Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (born August 4th, 1945) is a British-born American painter, art critic, theorist, and educator, born in Royal Tunbridge Wells, United Kingdom. In 1968, he moved to the United States. Gilbert-Rolfe holds several degrees, including a National Diploma in Painting from Tunbridge Wells School of Art (1965), an ATC from the
London University Institute of Education (1967), and an MFA from
Florida State University (1970). His work is in the permanent collections of the
Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, NY; The Getty Study Center, Los Angeles; the
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum).
LACMA was founded in 19 ...
; the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's ...
; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles and Minneapolis; the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
, New York; and other public, corporate and private collections.
Painting
Gilbert-Rolfe has shown in New York fairly regularly since 1970, and sporadically elsewhere. Regarding the general consensus that describes his work as "Geometric Abstraction," Gilbert-Rolfe says he wishes people would think about what he does with the category rather than how his work fits into it. He says he went to an exhibition at the
Tate Gallery
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
in London in 1963 to see the Pop art that was in it but what caught his attention instead, causing him to decide he needed to go to America, were the paintings of the
New York School and especially and specifically
Barnett Newman's ''
Vir Heroicus Sublimis'' (1951). The space in it felt as active as the space in
Howard Hawks’ ''
Red River'', which had entered his imagination when he was a child and stayed there.
Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is an American writer, known for her novels '' Telex from Cuba'' (2008), ''The Flamethrowers'' (2013), and '' The Mars Room'' (2018).
Early life
Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon, the daughter of two Communist scientist ...
discusses his indebtedness to Newman and Hawks, and much else in the work and practice, going on to say that she made an “automatic and instinctive” association of his painting Hottest Part of the Day (2001) with a poem of
Sappho's, and that it is her “sense that Gilbert-Rolfe has some uncanny mesh with feminine sensibilities… (His) electric verdure pulses—seductive, then bewildering, then seductive. Boucher, then radiator coolant, then Boucher.”
Flattered by Kushner's suggestion, he is however inclined to resist her further suggestion that “A line is a kind of violence, cutting the canvas as though it’s cutting a body. But color is violence as well, if of a soft, smothering sort. A smothering of reason.”
[ Aside from wondering whether a drawn line doesn't only divide but also connect, he is unwilling to accept the smothering of reason part. He says “his paintings are about complexity and as such have come to be about logic as much as anything else. Not logic as in philosophy, logic as in music, where one talks of it making sense but does not mean it provides a riddle and its answer. I want the work to interact with the viewer, to take place in the space around itself and between itself and the person looking at it, and to hold the attention for some time.” He has also said that seriousness is generally identified with terror, “but I want to identify it with questions of the formless… Art has to put you in touch with something that’s not manageable…. (but) it’s time to get rid of … tough-guy rhetoric about the sublime. Among other things, it would permit us to get closer to the sublime or sublimes that tough guys are too scared to touch.” As Kushner puts it, “Gilbert-Rolfe … lays out his ante, but never knows where a painting will go.”][
In 2010 he and Rebecca Norton began to work together as the collaboration Awkward x 2, making paintings together and also writing occasional blogs. Awkward has shown in Brooklyn, Chicago and Louisville to date.
]
Art Criticism and Theory
Gilbert-Rolfe writes about art and related topics, including poetry, fiction, fashion, with particular regard to its interaction with photography, technology, and the general state of things in art and how the present situation seems to have emerged. His publications include two anthologies of his essays, a book about Frank Gehry's architecture co-authored with the architect, ''Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime'', and other essays and reviews.
''Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime'' reformulates the traditional definition of the differential relationship between beauty and the sublime, in which beauty is a sign of the passive and feminine and the sublime of the active and male—heroic or terrifying depending on one’s perspective, or of course both. In Gilbert-Rolfe’s version Winckelmann’s masculine active becomes instead androgynous transitivity, while intransitivity replaces passivity as a still entirely feminine characteristic, the feminine as intransitivity being a sign or force that stands for, or embodies, power as a kind of powerlessness. As well as redefining the differential, ''Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime''’s argument also relocates the sublime from nature to technology, and with it subjectivity, from wherever it imagined itself to be to within techno-capitalism. Here and elsewhere Gilbert-Rolfe suggests that techno-capitalism and the subjectivity that accompanies it are largely made out of all that Heidegger warns against and denounces in his post-war essays on technology, for example the telephone's capacity to sever the mutual dependence of space and time. He has returned to some aspects of this argument in two essays in particular.
Starting out in Artforum
''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
, in 1973, he has written something at least once for most of the art magazines over the years, and more often for Critical Inquiry and Bomb. A founding editor of October, with Rosalind Krauss
Rosalind Epstein Krauss (born November 30, 1941) is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a criti ...
, Annette Michelson Annette Michelson (November 7, 1922 – September 17, 2018) was an American art and film critic and writer. Her work contributed to the fields of cinema studies and the avant-garde in visual culture.
Biography
Born in 1922, Michelson graduated from ...
and Lucio Pozzi
Lucio Pozzi (born 1935 in Milan) is an Italian-born, American artist currently based in Hudson, New York, and Valeggio sul Mincio, Verona, Italy. He studied architecture in Rome before moving to New York City in 1962.
Pozzi is a painter whose p ...
(who withdrew before the first issue was published,) Gilbert-Rolfe resigned from the journal after the third issue.
Honors
For painting, Gilbert-Rolfe has been honored by two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1979, 1989) a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1997) the Francis Greenberger Award (2001) and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2017). He was awarded an NEA fellowship in criticism in 1974 and was the 1998 recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art and Architectural Criticism.
Teaching
In 2015, Gilbert-Rolfe retired as a teacher from Art Center College of Design and received the title Professor/Chair Emeritus. He had been working there since 1986 after being hired to develop an MFA program for the school. Prior to that, he worked as an Instructor at the Art Department of Florida State University in 1971, a Lecturer at the Visual Arts Program of Princeton University in 1978, a Visiting Lecturer at the Art Department of Queens College, City University of New York in 1977, and as a Lecturer at the Departments of Art and Art History of Parsons School of Design from 1978 to 1980. He also served as a Lecturer at the Art Department of California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art university in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of both ...
in 1986 and as a Graduate Studies teacher at Art Center College of Design from 1986 to 2015. He was appointed as Chair from 2003 to 2014. In addition, he worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University School of Architecture from 1987 to 1989. Lastly, since 1999, he has been a Visiting Tutor at the Royal Academy Schools in London, teaching Painting.
Some of his most famous students while teaching at Art Center include: Lynn Aldrich, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Aaron Curry, Sharon Lockhart, Steve Roden, Sterling Ruby, Frances Stark, Jennifer Steinkamp
Jennifer Steinkamp (born December 22, 1958) is an American installation artist who works with video and new media in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.
Life and career
Born in Denver, Colorado in 1958, St ...
, Diana Thater, Pae White
Pae White (born 1963) is an American multimedia visual artist who is known for her unique portrayal of nature and rather mundane objects through her creations of suspended mobiles. She currently lives and works between Sonoma County Sonoma County ...
, and Jennifer West.[ ]
Bibliography
References
External links
ArtCritical.com: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy
20th-century American painters
American male painters
21st-century American painters
20th-century English painters
English male painters
Living people
1945 births
Frank Jewett Mather Award winners
Art Center College of Design people
20th-century American male artists
20th-century English male artists