Michael Rothenstein has an international reputation as an innovative and influential printmaker of the first rank and has long been recognized as a draughtsman and painter of vivid originality. Assembled out of actual objects and evocative found materials, photographs from old newspapers, studio paraphernalia, studio paraphernalia, crushed fragments of scrap metal and ripped and jagged planks, Rothenstein’s boxes have a starkly emotional impact. They reflect in the most direct way his enduring obsessions with a number of identifiable themes: violence, sexuality and alienation in modern life; the artist’s studio as the site of imaginative energies and brilliant transformations; the dynamic potency of the forces and forms of nature; the persistence into our technological culture of ancient signs and symbols. As a group, Michael Rothenstein’s boxes reveal the workings of a remarkable creative imagination, tensely alert to the vibrancy of the phenomenal world, open to modern experience in all its diversity.
Mel Gooding, Michael Rothenstein's Boxes, Art Books International, 1992, catalogue number 101, illustrated page 21, 103