Exhibition

Church & Rothko: Sublime

30 Sep 2020 – 12 Dec 2020

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

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Mnuchin Gallery, in collaboration with Michael N. Altman and Christopher Rothko, is pleased to present Church & Rothko: Sublime, a landmark exhibition mounted in a digitized, online experience and available for limited viewings by appointment.

About

Illustrating a lineage of affective color tensions between the Hudson River School landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and the Color Field canvases of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Church & Rothko: Sublime explores the aesthetic force of two American artists who probed the formal boundaries of the sublime.  

A preeminent painter in the nineteenth century, Frederic Edwin Church inscribed into his ethereal landscapes the astonishing spirituality inherent in the natural splendor of the Americas. He sought to express the rapture of the sublime in his paintings by reimagining and preserving the picturesque qualities of the natural world, during a time of rapid social change. Whether in the majestic presence of the Catskill mountains or the lush cradles of the South American tropics, Church articulated the sublime in his landscapes though delicately rendered details and divinely conceived expanses.

The evocative power of the sublime was further manifested in the twentieth century in Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings. With a reconceived approach to the sublime following the destruction of the Second World War, Rothko purged from his works all representation and reference to the external world. He translated, instead, the awesome emotional potential at the core of the sublime into transcendent encounters with plains of bold, unburdened pigment. In deceptively simple overlays of gestured and expressive fields of color, Rothko conjures the sublime in physical and visual appeals to unmediated, emotional responses.

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Frederic Edwin Church

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko

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