Red Bamboo

Susan Rothenberg

1991

A woodcut in which Susan Rothenberg pares the image to a single vertical red bamboo stalk and an ambiguous dark whorl above a pale green tiled field, aiming to distill a scene into elemental shapes and tactile marks that hover between representation and abstraction.

You’re struck by the vivid red stalk cutting through a soft, hand‑printed green checkerboard while the carved, scratchy black mass at the top gathers restless movement against the otherwise calm surface, making the print feel both flat and physically worked.

By translating her painterly gestures into woodcut, Rothenberg blurred figuration and abstraction and showed how printmaking could carry the immediacy and bodily presence central to late 20th‑century American art.

Palette

Art Terms

Woodcut Print Abstraction Figurative Gestural Figure/ground relationship Contemporary art

Exhibitions

American Prints from the International Program

1971

Committed to Print

1988

American Prints, 1960–1985

1987

Recent American Woodcuts and Prints by Marin, Hopper and Weber

1952