Background
Dorothea Rockburne was born on October 18, 1932 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Dorothea Rockburne was born on October 18, 1932 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Dorothea attended the Montreal Museum School in Montreal, Canada during 1948 - 1950. Then she attended Black Mountain College in Ashville in 1950 - 1952 where she studied with Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg among other contemporaries. While at Black Mountain College, the teachings of Max Dehn, a renowned German mathematician and close friend of Albert Einstein, made arguably the largest impact on Rockburne’s work. Dehn educated Rockburne about Pythagorean and Euclidean geometry, group theory and topology, and the concepts of harmonic intervals. Dehn’s teachings often merged the mathematical world and the natural world providing Rockburne with new and complex approaches to her work.
Rockburne moved to New York after she graduated. Although she won the Walter Gutman Emerging Artist Award in 1957, Rockburne struggled with her art, and so she turned to dance and performance art for several years. During that time she took on some side jobs to support herself, including a bookkeeping job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she catalogued the Egyptian Antiquities collection. Rockburne took a great interest in the art of ancient Egypt from a young age, and she later incorporated this interest into her works entitled "Egyptian Paintings", created in 1979 – 1980.
In 1963, Rockburne began assisting her friend and former schoolmate Robert Rauschenberg. For the next five years Rockburne worked in Rauschenberg’s studio; she participated in various performances with other artists, including Claes Oldenberg in a work entitled "Washes" at Al Roon’s Heath Club in New York City. A year later, Rockburne was working in her own studio again. She incorporated mathematics into her art, inspired by dance and how the body moves through space. Rockburne produced her "Set Theory" installations, which were first shown in 1970 at the Bykert Gallery, with this new inspiration.
In 1972, Rockburne received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Italy, where she continued her studies in Italian Art, and began to merge her classical training into her work. In the early 1990s, Rockburne began to study Astronomy and frescoes, combining these interests to create a major fresco secco for SONY headquarters in New York City entitled "Northern Sky, Southern Sky." In 2001, Rockburne participated in the comprehensive exhibition The Universe: Contemporary Art and the Cosmos, combining her knowledge and skill in Art, Music, Science, and Astronomy.
She has received many awards and honors during her successful career including the National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1974, the Witowsky Prize for Painting in 1976, participation at the 1980 Venice Biennale, and a membership in the Department of Art at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Rockburne currently lives and works in New York.
Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize.
Quotations: "Personally, as part of the creative process, I always title a work before I make it. In that way, from the outset, I know exactly what it is. I try to work with inspiration, intuition, knowledge and alchemy. It is a journey, inward and outward, deeply personal and yet having a commonality. And when I am through there is a painting, an object with dimension, and yet the real object exists as the experience I have gained in making the painting. The painting itself then contains everything I know and am at that moment and since I am always changing, the paintings are always changing."
Rockburne is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy of Design, and The Century Association.
Physical Characteristics: Ms. Rockburne has lively, penetrating eyes and a ready smile.
Dorothea Rockburne was married to Carroll Warner Williams but the marriage didn’t work out. Dorothea has a daughter Christine.
