Educational
1981
Canadian
Drawings
Works On Paper
Rives BFK on mat board with glue and blue pencil
Place Made,Canada
Unframed: 70 × 46 in. (177.8 × 116.84 cm)
Framed: 74 1/4 × 50 1/2 in. (188.6 × 128.27 cm)
85.570
Not on view

“I was intrigued by a statement from Courbet, who, in reaction against ecclesiastical work around him . . . said “Show me an angel and I’ll paint it.” I thought it would be more marvelous to do an abstract angel: since there were no people with big wings sitting around posing, angels were probably the first non-geometric abstraction in painting.”   - Dorothea Rockburne

Rockburne’s concern with geometry and with rational, ordered thinking links her to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, out of which her work developed in the 1960s. After exploring mathematical permutations and ideal proportions like the Golden Mean, Rockburne sought inspiration in the compositional principles of earlier art.

The square and elegant White Angel #2 is deceptively simple. Paper folded in geometric patterns, it appears to focus solely on its own making. But it is actually part of a series based on the work of the early Renaissance painter Duccio. The title, as well as the work’s folds and forms, refers to an angel guarding Christ’s tomb in a painting in the Cathedral of Siena.

Folded paper
signed 1.1 white angel #2, l.r. rockburne 81
Gift of the Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation
Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, February 22 – April 2, 1989; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, May 6 – June 18, 1989; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, July 22 – September 10, 1989; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, October 20 – December 31, 1989

The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation Collection, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, January 31 – March 14, 1982; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, September 10 – October 31, 1982; Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA, November 14, 1982 – January 16, 1983; University Memorial Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, January 30 – March 13, 1983; Muscarelle Museum, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, February 4 – April 14, 1984

Dorothea Rockburne: Egyptian Paintings and White Angels, 1979-81, Xavier Fourcade, New York, NY, September 22 - October 24, 1981
Collection of the artist; (Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York) by 1981; Purchased by the Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation, Richmond, Virginia in September of 1982; Gift to Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), Richmond, Virginia in 1985.
©artist or artist’s estate

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