cover image Beyond the Plane

Beyond the Plane

Richard H. Axsom. Hudson Hills Press, $45 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-55595-077-4

Rothschild is an American abstract painter associated with the New York School. Her lyrical, often biomorphic relief paintings of the past two decades are the focus of this album, which documents a 1991 exhibition at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery. Pictures such as Trees in Bloom II and False Legs Hang Down meditate on the processes of growth, decay and regeneration. With her monumental Gothics series of brightly colored acrylics on aluminum, she depicts forms reminiscent of seed pods, claws or the human heart. In the Eidolon series, joined U-shaped figures suggestive of phantasmagorical winged creatures hover against backdrops of colored vertical stripes. In his introductory essay Axsom, an art historian who has curated exhibits of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, traces Rothschild's roots in cubist and surrealist idioms and discusses her sources of inspiration ranging from Gothic architecture to Chinese landscape painting. (Dec.)