Private Collection, Italy (acquired in 1973 in the Galleria Schema, Florence)

Dorothea Rockburne is one of the most compelling figures in American abstraction. In 1950, the Montreal-trained artist enrolled at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she studied with the mathematician Max Dehn while also taking courses with artists such as Franz Kline and Philip Guston, as well as John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Her circle also included Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. In 1952, Rockburne participated in Cage’s celebrated Untitled Event, an early happening that dissolved the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, and performance. After moving to New York in 1955, she worked for a time as Rauschenberg’s studio manager and became part of the city’s avant-garde scene. Her engagement with mathematics, particularly set theory and topology, introduced to her by Max Dehn, became a fundamental conceptual framework for her artistic practice.
The work offered here, dating from 1973, is exemplary of this pivotal period. In the Drawing Which Makes Itself series, the paper itself becomes an active component of the artwork: folds, creases, and the resulting planes and lines determine the composition through the inherent properties of the material. Rockburne thus combined mathematical principles with a direct exploration of paper, space, and perception. The significance of this body of work was subsequently reaffirmed through major institutional exhibitions: in 2013, the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a solo exhibition of the same title to the series, while works from the group were featured in a comprehensive exhibition at Dia:Beacon between 2018 and 2022. Today, Rockburne’s works are held in major international collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Dia Art Foundation in New York. IS