Under a Red Cloud (2025)
Produced by Counter Studio, Margate
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Produced by Counter Studio, Margate
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Rothenstein’s enigmatic practice draws on found imagery, memory, and personal experience. Working intuitively, she employs fluid, flattened forms and meandering lines that merge figures with landscapes and interior spaces, creating a dreamlike atmosphere charged with psychological tension.
In Under a Red Cloud (2025), the artist invites the viewer to speculate on the identity of the figures and the nature of their journey—one that seems both physical and emotional.
Anne Rothenstein occupies a singular and quietly authoritative position in British art. Her painting practice is marked by an uncompromising psychological intensity and a fierce economy of means, refusing spectacle, narrative, or stylistic display. Often working from found imagery, memory and personal experience, Rothenstein’s images are less concerned with likeness than with presence — intuitive acts of layering and blending that create a dreamlike atmosphere charged with psychological tension. Her work belongs to a lineage of figurative practice that privileges intelligence, restraint, and moral seriousness over fashion or virtuosity.
Born in 1949, Rothenstein lives and works in London. She grew up in the Essex village of Great Bardfield, surrounded by artists, designers, and illustrators who shaped post-war British visual culture. While deeply formed by this environment, she resisted the decorative, folksy idiom often associated with the Great Bardfield circle. Instead, she developed a severe, pared-back visual language that suggests a conscious resistance to inheritance and style, an independence that has remained central to her practice. Largely self-taught, she undertook a foundation course at Camberwell School of Art before working as an actress for over a decade, an experience that sharpened her sensitivity to gesture, stillness, and psychological presence.
Rothenstein’s work was recognised early by writers and artists rather than by the market. Her long association with The New Yorker positioned her within a literary and intellectual culture that valued observation, character, and nuance over display. Writers, editors, and fellow artists were among her earliest champions.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2025), Charleston, Sussex (2024), and Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2024), with earlier solo presentations at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2022) and Beaux Arts Gallery, London (2021). A two-person exhibition with Irina Zatulovskaya took place at Pushkin House, London, in 2018. Her work is held in major public and private collections.