Dorothea Rockburne

Dorothea Rockburne was born in Montreal. She was educated at the Montreal Museum School and at Black Mountain College, where she studied with, among other contemporaries, Philip Guston and Franz Kline, as well as the German mathematician Max Dehn, whose teachings, merging the mathematical and natural worlds, provided her with new and complex approaches to her work. Her interests in the Golden Mean, astronomy, cosmology, and lifelong fascination with Egyptians’ use of proportion and light, additionally shaped her oeuvre.

Working with both industrial and natural materials, she paints, cuts, draws, folds and calculates to create complex works of art built upon mathematical foundations.

Selected museum exhibitions include Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind’s Eye, Parrish Art Museum; On Line: Drawing Through the 20th Century, Museum of Modern Art; The Women of Black Mountain College, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; High Times, Hard Times, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina;Dorothea Rockburne, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; and Dorothea Rockburne: Locus, Museum of Modern Art.

Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Auckland City Art Museum, among others. She has received numerous awards and honors, among them the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy, an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, Induction into American Academy of Arts and Letters, Brandeis University, Creative Arts Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her current exhibition, Drawing Which Makes Itself, is at the Museum of Modern Art through January 20th, 2014. Her show, Indication Drawings, at the Jill Newhouse Gallery, runs this October 2nd to November 15th.