Brian Rutenberg’s paintings reinvigorate and revitalize the medium. Raised in the South Carolina lowlands, Rutenberg has lived and worked in New York for the past 20 years. His work elicits a profoundly visceral experience as he reinvests abstraction with a sense of spirituality. Influenced by the music of Glenn Gould and Celtic culture, as well as the painters Joan Mitchell and Hans Hofmann, Rutenberg draws on the landscape that he remembers from childhood, growing up between Pawley’s Island and Charleston, where the rivers and lakes join the ocean. The landscape, complex in its layers, has guided Rutenberg’s approach to composition and color. This volume is the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date; it includes an essay by critic and writer Martica Sawin and a foreword by artist and writer Gregory Amenoff.

About the Artist

Brian Rutenberg was born in South Carolina in 1965. A graduate of the College of Charleston, South Carolina, Rutenberg participated in his first group exhibition in 1985 and moved to New York shortly thereafter. He received a Master of Arts degree from New York’s School of Visual Arts and received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1997. As a young and ambitious painter, he has sought to capture a unique representation of the landscape through abstraction. Rutenberg has had over fifty solo exhibitions throughout North America and his work is included in numerous museum collections including the Yale Gallery of Art, The Butler Institute of American Art, Peabody Essex Museum and the Greenville County Museum of Art. He is represented by Forum Gallery in New York City, where he also resides.

About the Authors

Martica Sawin has had a long career teaching art history and writing about contemporary art in New York. She is the author of the seminal book, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, and of mongraphs on Wolf Kahn, Nell Blaine, Stephen Pace, and Alan Gussow, as well as a contributor of essays and reviews to many books, museum catalogues, and journals.

Gregory Amenoff is a painter who lives in New York City and Ulster County, New York. He is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Tiffany Foundation. He has had over numerous one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of more than thirty museums, including the Whitney Museum of America Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amenoff has taught at Columbia for the last fifteen years, where he holds the Eve and Herman Gelman Chair of Visual Arts and is currently the Chair of the Visual Arts Division.