Dorothea Rockburne, "Interior Perspective, Discordant Harmony," 1985, oil on linen, 158.115 x 225.5282 x 10.16 cm (62 1/4 x 88 3/4 x 4 in)
Raised in Montreal, with escapes to a country house up north, the artist Dorothea Rockburne, 95, grew up steeped in nature: watching the northern lights, roaming snowy fields by flashlight, sailing a small boat across lakes. Later, studying at North Carolina’s experimental liberal arts school Black Mountain College (under the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the composer John Cage and the mathematician Max Dehn), she became interested in topology, geometry and set theory, a branch of mathematical logic that sorts objects into groups, studying their relationships. Over her seven decade career — spanning abstract sculpture, painting and installation — Rockburne has often used concepts from mathematics to guide her precise, geometric configurations, which she renders in modest materials such as grease, linen and chipboard. In exploring subtle relationships between space and form, shadow and light, her work gestures to what she calls “the universal language of nature.”
This month, London’s Bernheim Gallery presents the first European survey of Rockburne’s oeuvre. Across four floors of the gallery’s Mayfair townhouse, the exhibition includes 23 works produced between 1967 and 2013, some of which have never left the U.S. Viewers can marvel up close at Rockburne’s “Egyptian Paintings” (1979-80), a lattice of triangles, squares and diamonds, or “Les Pensées de Pascal” (1987-88), a throbbing sunset of a painting, its gold leaf undercoat aglow. Her installation “Domain of the Variable” (1972/2018/2024) spans the ground floor, with a horizontal line bisecting not only the gallery walls but the street-facing ground windows. “The Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Has Not Understood It” is on view through Jan. 25, 2025, bernheimgallery.com.