Michael Rothenstein has an international reputation as an innovative and influential printmaker of the first rank, and 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.
The Artist
Mel Gooding, Rothenstein's Boxes, Art Books International, London 1992, page 92, illustrated page 99, catalogue number 45