Susan Charna Rothenberg (January 20, 1945 – May 18, 2020) was an American contemporary painter, printmaker, sculptor, and draughtswoman. She became known as an artist through her iconic images of the horse, which synthesized the opposing forces of abstraction and representation. Early life and education Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, on January 20, 1945, the daughter of Adele (Cohen), a president of the Buffalo Red Cross, and Leonard Rothenberg, who owned a supermarket chain. In 1965, she graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. In 1967, she went to Washington, D.C., and studied at George Washington University and the Corcoran Museum School. In 1969, she moved to New York, where she became a member of a dedicated community of artists. Through large acrylic paintings featuring emblematic, life-sized images of horses, largely monochromatic, she established her reputation in the New York art world in the early 1970s. Career Rothenberg's first solo exhibition in New York in 1975 was at the 112 Greene Street Gallery. Consisting of three large-scale paintings of horses, it was heralded for introducing imagery into minimalist abstraction, while bringing a new sensitivity to figuration. Critic Peter Schjeldahl called the show "a eureka," stating that "the large format of the pictures was a gesture of ambition," and that "the mere reference to something really existing was astonishing." From the mid-1970s on Rothenberg has been recognized as one of the most innovative and independent artists of her period of contemporary period. During an era when minimalism was at the forefront of the New York Art scene, she stood out because of her reintroduction of expression and figuration. Rothenberg's horse figures of the 70s contained some degree of minimalism because of their repetitive qualities, her hectic yet loose rendering of the figures blended the earlier conventions of abstract expressionism and color field painting. By the early 1980s, she was focusing on disembodied heads and body parts, and by the end of the decade she was painting complex and symbolic figurative works full of color and movement. After moving to a ranch near Galisteo, New Mexico, her paintings reflected life in the Southwestern United States and became suffused with color. Beginning in the 1990s, she used the 'memory of observed and experienced events' (a riding accident, a near-fatal bee sting, and other events) as the inspiration for her subjects and adopted oil