Raquel Rabinovich in her studio in Rheinbeck, New York in 2024 (all pictures courtesy the Raquel Rabinovich Artwork Belief)
Raquel Rabinovich, who created delicate monochromatic work, works on paper, and sculptures, died of most cancers on January 5 on the age of 95 in her residence in Rhinebeck, New York, the Raquel Rabinovich Artwork Belief confirmed to Hyperallergic.
Rabinovich’s palimpsestic summary work, akin to these from the Dimension 5 (1969–74) sequence, seem as if lit from an not possible supply, inducing the disorienting impact of the attention adjusting to a brand new setting. Although painstakingly layered with supplies like oil, pencil, and wax, they’ve the impact of a well-worn reminiscence rubbed away.
The artist was born in 1929 right into a Russian and Roman Jewish household in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Córdoba. She studied with Italian painter Ernesto Farina on the College of Córdoba from 1950 to ’52, earlier than returning to Buenos Aires to coach below painter Héctor Basaldúa. Within the mid-’50s, she departed for Europe and lived in Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Paris, the place she studied artwork historical past on the Sorbonne and artwork with Cubist painter André Lhote. In 1956, she married José Luis Reissig, with whom she had three youngsters.
Raquel Rabinovich, “Dimension Five 3” (1970), oil on linen, 36 x 46 inches (~91.4 x 116.8 cm)
The couple returned to Buenos Aires within the early ’60s, marking the start of Rabinovich’s musings on what she termed the “dark source,” or the hidden elements of the world that trace at a deeper realm of information and knowledge. This concept would inflect her work for the remainder of her life.
“I have been repeatedly drawn to spaces of silence and darkness in which my work can transcend its materiality, and where I can access a primordial source of ideas and inspiration,” Rabinovich informed the web journal Frontera D in 2020.
The more and more unstable political local weather of Argentina, culminating in a navy coup in 1966, compelled Rabinovich to decamp to the USA along with her husband and kids the 12 months after. They settled in Huntington, Lengthy Island, the place she joined the American Summary Artists group, a company based by artists together with Josef Albers and Alice Trumbull Mason.
Raquel Rabinovich in her Huntington, New York studio (1970)
Within the ’70s, she skilled a dream by which her work remodeled into clear and free-standing sculptures, and commenced to deliver them into existence. In “Tabletop Glass Sculpture (Untitled 1)” (1974), as an example, three adjoining dark-gray glass panes appear to deepen and lighten as planes overlap and separate whereas the viewer circumambulates.
A 1970 group present on the Caravan Home Gallery titled 4 Argentine Artists Dwelling in New York marked a turning level within the artist’s profession. All through the ’70s, she confirmed on the Suffolk Museum Sculpture Backyard, the Metropolis College of New York Graduate Middle, and the Jewish Museum Sculpture Court docket.
After Rabinovich and Reissig divorced in 1979, she moved to a loft in Manhattan the place she frequently hosted fellow artists. (The couple would rekindle their relationship in 1987.) Within the ’80s, she started training Vipassana, a Buddhist type of meditation that emphasizes perception which in flip led to travels to South and Southeast Asia, together with historic ruins that impressed her to work in site-specific installations. These included “Point/Counterpoint” (1983), comprising panes of bronze-tempered glass set at odd angles that alternatively mirrored and obscured the buildings within the surrounding Lincoln Middle for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.
Raquel Rabinovich, “Point Counterpoint at Lincoln Center” (1985), bronze-tempered glass and silicone adhesive, 102 x 210 x 120 inches (~2.6 x 5.3 x 3 m)
After transferring to Rhinebeck in Upstate New York within the ’90s, Rabinovich turned lively within the artwork and Buddhist communities and commenced to interact extra deeply with the pure setting, notably the Hudson River. Her 2001–12 sequence Emergences takes the type of stone sculptures, a few of that are nonetheless extant, put in alongside the banks of the river which might be hid and revealed by the tide’s rise and fall. River Library (2002–25) consists of mud adhered to scrolls of Essindia paper usually organized in an natural grid, which Rabinovich described as a tackle historic clay tablets — a type of that “dark source” come to gentle.
Rabinovich acquired the 2011–2012 Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement, and her work is held within the collections of museums together with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Her work has just lately been proven in exhibitions on the Americas Society and the Frances Lehman Loeb Artwork Middle at Vassar Faculty.
Raquel Rabinovich, “River Library 373” (2010), Rio de la Plata mud and glue on Essindia paper, 11 x 14 1/2 inches (~27.9 x 62.2 cm)
