Lenke Rothman: Quality of Life

From the 1950s until her death in 2008, Rothman developed a unique feminist œuvre, where aspects of the everyday are set against a biographical and historic backdrop. Characterised by the radical processing of a lived present after the Shoah, Rothman’s practice negotiates lines of temporality and transience through, amongst other things, the preservation ephemeral and forgotten materials in a body of work that moves from abstract painting in the 1950s into the vocabulary of post-conceptual feminist sculpture in the 1960s and 70s. By recurring gestures – sewing, mending and enveloping, carving texts into fabric or paper, and holding together torn or decaying fragments – Rothman gives form to impermanence and memory alike, emphasising clothing as a membrane between fragile bodies and the world that surrounds them. Here, Rothman’s gestural poetics understand repair as the materialisation of the perpetual guided by the question: ‘How can life be saved and preserved despite constant destruction?’