Whatever may seem to be the case, Rothenstein’s abstract mode in these relief’s, like that of the prints he was making at the same time, is much less rigorous then such titles suggest. As always in his work, the actualities of the perceived world are ever-present: in daylight or moonlight, suggestions of landscape, of the division of earth and sky, of the curved outlines of hills , sinuous oxbow river bends; or else, as in Red and Blue … they are like doors or windows, letting on to an imagined space and lightm (1). 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. (1)Mel Gooding, Michael Rothenstein’s Boxes, Art Books International, 1992, page 5
The Artist
London, Hamilton Galleries (Mrs.Juda), Michael Rothenstein September 13 - October 8 1966, number 17
Mel Gooding, Rothenstein's Boxes, Art Books International, London 1992, pages 5, 16, 92, illustrated page 98, catalogue number 34