Overview
For Frieze Masters 2025, Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to feature six new paintings by British artist Anne Rothenstein.
Six new paintings by Anne Rothenstein feature in the Studio section of the fair, curated by Sheena Wagstaff with Margrethe Troensegaard. Bringing together new works and studio ephemera, the selection explores the artist’s intuitive process and broad range of inspirations. Some of these, including Japanese Nihonga paintings, historical wood engravings and contemporary photography, inform Rothenstein’s vivid personal exploration of memory.
For Frieze Masters 2025, Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to feature six new paintings by British artist Anne Rothenstein.
Installation Views
Images are our first language, our whole world pre-speech and, perhaps because I come from a family of artists, they seem to have remained my most important language. My feelings and thoughts surface through images, not intellectually but instinctively.
Anne Rothenstein
Anne Rothenstein’s enigmatic paintings are frequently characterised by a dreamlike quality. Mysterious figures often populate her flattened landscapes and interiors.
The artist draws inspiration from found imagery, personal experience and memory, working instinctively to communicate atmosphere and psychological tension. Rothenstein’s scenes are rendered with sinuous lines and a distinctive palette. Often painting directly on wood panel, the artist allows grain to blend with figure and landscape.
Rothenstein builds her works in washes of oil, allowing stretches of the panel’s grain to remain visible. Here, the wood pattern rises through the blue wash, suggesting ripples and wave patterns. Rothenstein quotes Derek Jarman as she thinks about blue in this work.
Blue protects white from innocence
Blue drags black with it.
Blue is darkness made visible.
Avoiding our gaze is a common feature of Rothenstein’s subjects. Like her characters, her paintings are at once beautiful and troubling, sensual and sinister.
Chloë Ashby
I paint on wooden panels, and the grain of the wood is integral to the resultant image. The grain may eventually get lost beneath the layers of paint, but when I first examine the surface of a new panel I will be seduced and guided by what I see in those arbitrary lines and swirls: its scribble.
Anne Rothenstein
Rothenstein’s limited palette is vital to controlling the tone of the composition. “I look at a lot of Japanese art, wood cuts in particular”, the artist explains. “The use of a deep black set against the lightest wash of colour is something that I return to often. I spend hours finding a form which enables me to place black in the centre of a painting."
The language of my images has absorbed our overtly dangerous and increasingly worrying world. Wars and climate destruction elbow their way in; so often now, the grains on my panels suggest floods and fire rather than rivers and fields.
Anne Rothenstein
My reasons, or intentions, when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me. The spark is always lit from an existing image, a photograph or another painting, and I often don’t discover why that image leaped out at me or what it is I’m exploring until the work is finished. Sometimes I never find out. It is almost entirely intuitive.
Anne Rothenstein
Pink Waves depicts a pair of silhouetted trees against a cool background, contrasted with delicate pink clouds and a red full moon. The painting developed from the artist’s desire to work with a certain palette. Rothenstein recounts a need to paint with blue. She explains, "where white is dominant, the reds and pinks, [create] stark contrasts.”
In Black Lion, Rothenstein's black animal motif reoccurs. Describing the subject in this work, she remarks, “I think perhaps it is both predator and protector. I am very interested in the dark side of things, in underlying malevolence, hidden violence. A black dog, panther or lion with blood around its feet, is an image which seems to have lodged with me as some sort of metaphor and rather apt expression of this.”
When I look at your works, their solitariness comforts me. It’s rare that you see solitude as a happy thing. In front of your work it’s, “OK, it’s me and no one else.” With your landscapes, I feel like I’m in the middle and I don’t really need anyone else.
Working instinctively to communicate atmosphere and psychological tension, Rothenstein’s painting is frequently characterised by a dreamlike quality. In Red Moon, the dark silhouette of a solitary tree cuts through the horizon line. A red, full moon peeks out beneath its branches, colouring the tree’s leaves and the clouds above.
Sometimes the grain of the wood I work on does something wonderful when given a thin slick of paint, quite by chance. The whole painting can change around it, but I will treasure and protect this beautiful, accidental section hoping I can do it justice.
Anne Rothenstein
Exhibition Highlights
