Arts

Raquel Rabinovich, Artist of Submerged Worlds, Dies at 95

Raquel Rabinovich in her studio in Rheinbeck, New York in 2024 (all pictures courtesy the Raquel Rabinovich Art Trust)

Raquel Rabinovich, who created delicate monochromatic work, works on paper, and sculptures, died of most cancers on January 5 at the age of 95 in her house in Rhinebeck, New York, the Raquel Rabinovich Art Trust confirmed to Hyperallergic

Rabinovich’s palimpsestic summary work, comparable to these from the Dimension Five (1969–74) collection, seem as if lit from an unattainable supply, inducing the disorienting impact of the attention adjusting to a brand new atmosphere. Though 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 at the University of Córdoba from 1950 to ’52, earlier than returning to Buenos Aires to coach beneath painter Héctor Basaldúa. In the mid-’50s, she departed for Europe and lived in Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Paris, the place she studied artwork historical past at the Sorbonne and artwork with Cubist painter André Lhote. In 1956, she married José Luis Reissig, with whom she had three youngsters. 

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 facets of the world that trace at a deeper realm of data 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 told the online magazine 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 United States together with her husband and youngsters the 12 months after. They settled in Huntington, Long Island, the place she joined the American Abstract Artists group, a company based by artists together with Josef Albers and Alice Trumbull Mason. 

In the ’70s, she skilled a dream wherein her work remodeled into clear and free-standing sculptures, and started to convey them into existence. In “Tabletop Glass Sculpture (Untitled 1)” (1974), for 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 at the Caravan House Gallery titled 4 Argentine Artists Living in New York marked a turning level within the artist’s profession. Throughout the ’70s, she confirmed at the Suffolk Museum Sculpture Garden, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Jewish Museum Sculpture Court.

After Rabinovich and Reissig divorced in 1979, she moved to a loft in Manhattan the place she usually hosted fellow artists. (The couple would rekindle their relationship in 1987.) In the ’80s, she started practising 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 Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. 

After transferring to Rhinebeck in Upstate New York within the ’90s, Rabinovich grew to become lively within the artwork and Buddhist communities and started to have interaction extra deeply with the pure atmosphere, significantly the Hudson River. Her 2001–12 collection Emergences takes the shape of stone sculptures, some 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 mild.

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 Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Her work has just lately been proven in exhibitions at the Americas Society and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

Rabinovich is survived by her youngsters, Celia, Pedro, and Nora; 9 grandchildren; and 6 great-grandchildren. “She was the matriarch of our family and an important member of the Hudson Valley Buddhist community,” one of her granddaughters, Lucia Reissig, advised Hyperallergic in an electronic mail. “She had so many friends. She will be greatly missed.”



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