Gateless
Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary
February 11\u2013May 9, 2026
New York<\/p>\n
Today, when big gestures are often the rule and superior connoisseurship can seem like a rarity, this hauntingly exquisite selection of Raquel Rabinovich\u2019s work is a respite from the world\u2019s chaos. Assembled to honor the first anniversary of her death, this exhibition jewel box contains a gem from each period of her practice, lovingly celebrated in essays in a memorial catalog. Her subtle works, many made over extended periods, require prolonged contemplation, causing the exhibition to feel like a meditation. Although culled from different decades of the artist\u2019s production, they all inhabit infinite reaches of the timeline. Like the river sediments she often used, even her painted strokes feel like they were laid down at the dawn of creation.<\/p>\n
Rabinovich\u2019s work is timeless in the truest sense of the word: it resides in eternity encompassing past, present, and future. One of the exhibition\u2019s most moving features is a dictionary projected on a gallery wall, which was written by Rabinovich in 2024. Creating this epithet in the final year of her life, she defines existence as a \u201cPrimordial state outside language.\u201d Perhaps in preparation for her final journey, she defines threshold as a \u201cPortal into an unknown realm,\u201d and death as \u201cThe ultimate metaphor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s begin with Dimension Five 1 (1970) and an essay by Alex Bacon describing how Jasper Johns, seeing the series from which this work came from at the Benson Gallery in 1970, initiated his lifelong friendship with Rabinovich. In Dimension Five 1, a suspended square acts as a mysterious portal. It is hard not to think of some of the transparent rectangles within rectangles found in the Light and Space works of Robert Irwin; Rabinovich has accomplished with paint what Irwin accomplished with scrims. In a large graphite and rubber-stamped drawing, Invisible Cities 6 (1984\u201385), we see another portal in the form of an arch. The charcoal post-and-lintel is like the \u201cfalse doors\u201d in Egyptian tombs\u2014doors that allowed the Ka to pass into the afterlife. Rabinovich\u2019s dictionary defines portal as a \u201cLiminal space, gateless gate.\u201d The liminal is the in-between realm, between waking and dream, life and death, mortal and divine\u2014this is where her work resides.<\/p>\n
Raquel Rabinovich had important friendships with poets and writers. Robert Kelly dedicated the poem \u201cRiver Library with Footnotes\u201d to her Mississippi River mud drawings. A beautiful watercolor on Indian paper, When Silence Becomes Poetry 3: for Robert Kelly (2015), is her return tribute. This small masterpiece is paired with When Silence Becomes Poetry 4: for George Quasha (2016), another tribute to a poet friend. These small watercolors have the same layered delicate touch of Mark Tobey, another master of the meditative stroke. In Argentina, Rabinovich formed a friendship with Jorge Luis Borges and asked him to make a poetic Spanish translation of \u201cThe Dark is Light Enough\u201d for her series and exhibition. Here at Hutchinson Modern, we see two paintings from this 1963 series: La oscuridad tiene su luz 8 and La oscuridad tiene su luz 17. La oscuridad tiene su luz 17 is a key work, the first time the artist used the subtle squares which appear later. The Argentine writer\u00a0and friend Luisa Valenzuela has also contributed to the catalog. Valenzuela describes a trip to visit Rabinovich shortly before her death when they both decided that the word \u201cForever\u201d would be their mantra.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GatelessHutchinson Modern & ContemporaryFebruary 11\u2013May 9, 2026New York Today, when big gestures are often the rule and superior…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,3461,3462,3455,17,1117,3465,749,75,84,83,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-181441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}