It’s been said that the sensuous experiences provided by artistic representation offer up to the mind a means of considering, simultaneously, both its own participation in raw materiality and its contemplative separateness from it. In the collection of paintings by Anne Rothenstein presented here, physical sensation is presented as a sidelong route towards intense (and intensely personal) mental states. Her figures are all pasted into settings which seem to influence them in the way a piano is influenced by a child poking at its keys. Her subjects' gazes are all elsewhere, cast towards nothing by the ambient queerness of the places they're in.

Much of Rothenstein’s other work looks as though it has been transported to us through time, somewhat indirectly, from about a century ago. Her demure but uncanny figures have the undeniable perversion, the directness, of expressionism; her bare scenes are made almost opulent by an inclination for the decorative, which is always applied just slightly strangely. The pictures shown here, however, seem to exist quite distinctly outside of time. While they maintain Rothenstein’s proclivities for the enigmatic and the alienated, they’re less oddly outward than they are hermetically inward.

In The Red Coat, a painting from 2018, a lone figure stands columnar just slightly down from the painting’s dead center; she’s surrounded by a gradient of mossy matte, and nothing more. The figure’s surroundings are as greenly bare as the geometry of her body appears randomly grafted onto them. She seems wholly enclosed — unrelational — in herself, except for one small, smart feature of the composition. Near the figure's knees, the painting's titular coat juts out into a triangle, as would a garment blown sharply by the wind. Despite the desolated separateness of her physical environment from her, the figure seems to register this gust — the painting's sole hint of action — with a shiver and a squint, recognizing at once her physical presentness and her separateness from it. In much the same way, we ourselves are affected towards contemplation — as if by the wind, and fully through our senses — by looking at Rothenstein's mysterious paintings.

- The Editors

I find it hard to write about my work. In many ways, I’m far more interested in what the viewer sees than my intentions. But I can talk about my practice.I always work in oil paint on wood, wood is a lovely tough surface, I can scar and scrape it and treat it roughly. I like it’s the grain which I sometimes incorporate. 

I love the physicality of painting. I love the smell of oil paint and how each color feels different on the end of my brush when I lay it down. I love the feel of the shiny, lacquered handles of brand new sable brushes. I don’t like how my shoulder aches at the end of a long and concentrated day. 

The act of painting is to experience so many sensations, to use all one’s senses and sometimes even an extra nameless one, the elusive one (the sixth one ?) which, when things are going right, can pull everything together like a miracle, but it’s a rare visitor. 

My reasons, or intentions, when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me. The spark is always lit from an existing image, a photograph or another painting,  and I often don’t discover why that image leaped out at me or what it is I’m exploring until the work is finished. Sometimes I never find out. It is almost entirely intuitive. Finding a rhythm, searching for balance, alert to missteps, to what is happening, to changes of direction. I am telling myself a story much of the time and asking questions. Who is this, where is this place, what is going on? 

This is what I think of as the noise of a painting. And of course, what I am trying to reach is the silence. There is a wonderful Philip Guston quote about studio ghosts:  “ When you’re in the studio painting there are a lot of people in there with you” (he had his ghosts, I have mine) “and one by one, if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting YOU walk out. “  That is what I mean by reaching the silence.