Marybeth Rothman

National Autism Awareness Month

A very special message and offering during April 2024 from Marybeth Rothman & the gallery during national autism awareness month.

SPECIAL MESSAGE

Recent Observations and Conjectures Near Madaket Road

Marybeth Rothman is a contemporary American artist known for her reclaimed and reimagined, fictional, visual biographies and abstract narratives. Combining abstraction and realism with a focus on metaphor and symbolism, Rothman explores themes of identity utilizing shapes inspired by nature. Her June 2023 solo exhibition Recent Observations and Conjectures Near Madaket Road was on view at Frederick Holmes and Company Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art.

In July 2023 she exhibited in “Modigliani and the Modern Portrait” at the Nassau County Museum of Art. In addition to Modigliani, the exhibition featured works by Picasso, Man Ray, Gaston Lachaise, Jacques Henri-Lartigue, Chana Orloff, Thomas Hart Benton, David Hockney, Rineke Dijkstra, and Eric Fischl.

Rothman was a Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, Semifinalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2022. She has exhibited in the Delaware Contemporary Museum, Heckscher Museum of Art, The Delaware Contemporary, Hunterdon Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum, New Jersey State Museum and Cape Cod Museum of Art. Her work can by be found in collections throughout the United States and abroad. Rothman was born in Massachusetts and earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her home and studio are in New Jersey.

Artist Statement

I explore themes of identity by creating fictional, visual biographies and abstract deconstructed narratives. My work is a fusion of reclaimed and reimagined orphaned and digital photographs, abstract drawings, and other antique ephemera that I digitally alter, combine and repurpose to add narrative texture. I manipulate the image by exaggerating, adding and subtracting physical attributes to create illusory detail. Each of these mixed media works is composed of many subtle layers of pigmented beeswax monotypes, photographs, abstract drawings and antique ephemera which form an amalgam of a biographical detail. I develop a series of paintings by creating an imagined fellowship or community, geographic location or cultural bond for the subjects of these lost and forgotten photographs. I celebrate the human response to identify the other.

The String Section of The Mill Creek Community Orchestra