LIGHT OVER DARK

LEAH ROSENBERG


OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY, JANUARY 19TH
4:00 - 7:00PM

EXHIBITION DATES:
JANUARY 19 - FEBRUARY 25, 2023

“He drew a circle that shut me out—Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him in!” —Edwin Markham

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to announce Light Over Dark, its first solo exhibition with San Francisco–based artist Leah Rosenberg. Following years of museum and institutional exhibitions, including a recent exhibition and mural at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rosenberg returns to the intimacy of the gallery with a new series of oil paintings on linen. The public is invited to an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, January 19, 2023, 4–7 pm.

Rosenberg’s practice to date usually involves initiating art experiences through site-specific installations, layers of acrylic paint, public art activations, and food, and so these paintings mark a dramatic shift. The artist abandons her usual hard lines and distinct layers for a brushier and more imperfect approach that embraces the seduction and mercurial nature of paint itself. In oil painting terminology, “light over dark” refers to layering semi-transparent light colors over dark colors to create an illuminating effect. While this is not a guiding principle in these paintings, the idea of light overcoming darkness is imbued in the making of them. Their hand-painted shapes and blended-together hues make the works about motion, activation, being alive. Their colors, the artist notes, tell us something about who they are.

In the paintings, an imperfect and irregular circle, most often within a perfect square, is both a metaphor and a recurring compositional element. The circle as a symbol—for the infinite, the whole, the total, the self—has echoed throughout Rosenberg’s practice, but here she engages it as a device in service of her constant courtship with abstraction, paint, color, and form. She likens the undertaking to Jasper Johns’s flag paintings or Susan Rothenberg’s horse paintings. In Rothenberg’s words: “The horse was just something that happened on both sides of my line. The image held the space and the line kept the picture flat.” (New York Magazine, 1976)

Rosenberg’s practice spans painting, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and food, and focuses in particular on the role of color in our lives—its emotional and psychological impact. What began as making paintings led to making cakes, which led to layering paint on an ever-larger scale, which led to making work for an audience and projects involving ideas around sharing and giving. The question of whether an artwork can be generous is an ongoing inquiry. With these new paintings, that question is still present, and the answer is still enthusiastically “yes,” but the concept has shifted from that of an unexpected exchange of a physical gift to more abstract ideas of social exchange and aesthetic contemplation. Abstraction is generous by nature, Rosenberg believes, because it creates the opportunity for “moments to stop and look and connect with what resonates for us.” Rosenberg’s paintings meet the viewer where they are at, and ask for neither more nor less.

Rosenberg has been exhibited extensively throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally. She has been a recipient of the Irvine Fellowship through the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center, the Kala Fellowship at Kala Art Institute. Rosenberg has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Project 387, Facebook, Google, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and McColl Center for Art + Innovation and the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence program. In 2019, she was invited to talk about the language of color for TEDxSan Francisco. Her work is also held in private collections in the US and abroad.

EXHIBITION IMAGES: