The slightly lopsided arch, salvaged from an relief construction, which we might take to be an image of sunset is more properly considered as a mysterious memorial or the picture of a prehistoric symbolic monument. It does not have the symmetrical orderings and its roughness of finish gives it an urgency of expression, but the placing of the arch on its prominence, and the unity of the presentation, gives it something of their hieratic quality. It is like a little altarpiece enclosing a simple sacred emblem; a charm against Apollonian proportion, perhaps, a celebratory icon of the curved and flowing, of the energetically incomplete. (1) Michael Rothenstein has an international reputation as an innovative and influential printmaker of the first rank, and he has long been recognised as a draughtsman and painter of vivid originality. Assembled out of actual objects and evocative found materials, photographs from old newspapers, studio paraphernalia, brushes, paintboxes and rags, crushed fragments of scrap metal, 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. Together, 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, its terrible beauty and inescapable darkness. (1) Mel Gooding, Michael Rothenstein’s Boxes, Art Books International, 1992, page 35, 37
The Artist
Mel Gooding, Michael Rothenstein's Boxes, Art Books International, 1992, catalogue number 107 and illustrated page 34.