JEFFREY ROTHSTEIN • Biography

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“Jeffrey’s powerful body of work demonstrates the vast beauty of his compositions and his eye for rich color and sensual forms. He has created a thematic architecture with his work, a way of thinking about photography that is perfectly of the moment, alive to its unique technology; film with the use of digital printing and the conceptual possibilities of painterly abstraction.”

Jerome Liebling
Founder of the photography program and professor emeritus of Hampshire College


“Working within traditional landscape ideas and painterly concepts, Jeffrey creates a new landscape with his own language of photography.”

Amelia Abdullahasani
Director Lu Magnus and Stellan Holm Galleries

Jeffrey studied photography under the post war New York School photographers, Jerry Liebling and Elaine Mays and painting with Arthur Hoener, an early OpArt painter and student of Josef Albers at Hampshire College in the early 80’s. Post college, he was a photo assistant to the modern master Richard Avedon, and Bruce Weber while attending The Whitney Independent Study Program studying with guest artists Richard Serra and Brice Marsden.

He segued into the art world when Paul Morris of his eponymous gallery invited him to show his series of underwater nudes in the late 90’s.

Jeffrey’s diverse body of work deals with evocative meditations on the nexus of painting and photography as well as the themes of art history with respect to specific periods of painting and the contemporary art world itself. His photographic work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, which are researched at length before embarking on to a specific location to photograph. His earlier work was shot on film, scanned, and balanced digitally before printing. With his newer series, Heavenly Bodies and Oblique Strategies, he forgoes a camera all together and creates his images entirely using digital capture.

For his Zion Canyon/Plateaux of Mirrors series, he studied with a professor of Chinese Art history and a curator of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum for two years focusing on scroll paintings of the Tang and Song dynasties. This body of work is not about photographing the actual appearance of the natural world. Instead, Jeffrey distills his impressions as did the painters of the Song Dynasty to create works that idealize the natural world and emphasize the graphic qualities that enable him to translate nature into an essential impressionistic medium that conveys the energy and spirit of the landscape in a painterly abstract form.

With his on-going project, The Architecture of Mountains, Jeffrey has access to a low orbit geo-survey satellite as his camera. While the global landscape has been transformed by millennia of human occupation, his artistic expression has also been deeply imprinted with images of the natural world. Going beyond representation, these “landscapes of the mind” as he likes to call them are imbued with personal feelings to convey the inner landscape of the artist’s imagination.

For his newest series, Oblique Strategies, he continues his examination of painterly space. Making works that are both bold in their simplicity and geometric forms as his visual vocabulary is drawn from his love of geometric abstract art of the 1960’s and 70’s. Along with his passion for geometric forms of that era he then used black and white erotic images over-layed with colourful geometric forms to create the Heavenly Bodies series.

Born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He spent his early years in the Caribbean, attended secondary school in London but has always called New York City home.

BA- Hampshire College, Amherst Ma. 1982

The Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program (ISP) NY 1984


EXHIBITIONS
•Kasher/Potamkin Gallery, Chelsea NYC
•The Tarn Collection/ Zion Mandala, England
•Lu Magnus Gallery/What the Thunder Said, New, NY
•Unwrap Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
•Susan Eley Gallery/Blaze, New York, NY
•Unwrap Gallery/Mie Gakure, Tokyo, Japan
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca.
•Boltax Gallery- Summer Girls, Shelter Island, NY
•The Tarn Collection, London, England
•Paul Morris Gallery- New York, NY
•Paul Morris Gallery-The Armory Show
•Saibu Gallery/Summer’s Soft Song-Tokyo, Japan
•Baron/Boisante- Trippy World ,New York, NY
•Jason McCoy Gallery-Kansas City, MO
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY-The Armory Show