“We all wore ice skates because this
was a marriage on thin ice.”
Barbara Rossi
Barbara Rossi
At the age
of 28 the currently Chicago based artist Barbara Rossi ceased to
be a bride of Christ and after the divorce she went on to obtain her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then
become a professor of painting and drawing for the institution.
During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Rossi was an active member the
Chicago Imagists; a pop art inspired movement that sourced surrealism, Art Brut, and comics for their inspiration rather
than New York’s pop art that sourced commercial advertising and popular illustration for inspiration.
As the Chicago private art dealer Karen Lennox has said,
"One was very personal, the other anti-personal."
An observation supported by Rossi in the video Marriage
Chicago Style “We were in the middle of the Vietnam War. We had lots of
protests against our government, we had also lots of protests against our way
of treating certain people. Younger people were actually asked to know what
they were about; to know themselves.”
It is this
journey of self-discovery that impels Rossi’s work, if at times tongue in
cheek, as she explores her original relationship that has become an ongoing friendship that still exists even after the divorce albeit colored by her travels in India and Asia..
As The
Renaissance Society’s Joe Scanlan wrote about her 1991 exhibition of selected works “These
paintings could be seen as representing the piling up in one's mind of
variously-shaped information, experiences, or memories; as exotic but
burdensome "emotional baggage" people often accumulate in their
lives; or Rossi's implicit awareness and reversal of society's overemphasis on
surface appearances, as in hair styles, plastic surgery, or cosmetics. In these
paintings it is the beauty and intensity of Rossi's endeavor that enriches her
work and creates its sensual and tactile appearance.”
About Rossi’s
1981 painting Double Crossing Lonesome Valley (see
above) the LA
Times David Pagel wrote “Rossi’s shapes,
painted slightly different shades of the same colors, evoke a flock of
improbable associations, some tasteful, even prim, others sensuous, nearly
salacious. If a bouquet of flowers mated with a vase, its offspring might
resemble the abstract figures.”
Whereas the artist considers the painting to be “a picture of two
sandals making their way through the desert.”
Rossi’s current exhibition Barbara
Rossi: Poor Traits is on show at New York’s New
Museum until the 3rd of January.
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