Raquel Rabinovich, who created subtle monochromatic paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, died of cancer on January 5 at the age of 95 in her home in Rhinebeck, New York, the Raquel Rabinovich Art Trust confirmed to Hyperallergic.
Rabinovich’s palimpsestic abstract paintings, such as those from the Dimension Five (1969–74) series, appear as if lit from an impossible source, inducing the disorienting effect of the eye adjusting to a new environment. Though painstakingly layered with materials like oil, pencil, and wax, they have the effect of a well-worn memory rubbed away.
The artist was born in 1929 into a Russian and Roman Jewish family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Córdoba. She studied with Italian painter Ernesto Farina at the University of Córdoba from 1950 to ’52, before returning to Buenos Aires to train under painter Héctor Basaldúa. In the mid-’50s, she departed for Europe and lived in Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Paris, where she studied art history at the Sorbonne and art with Cubist painter André Lhote. In 1956, she married José Luis Reissig, with whom she had three children.
The couple returned to Buenos Aires in the early ’60s, marking the beginning of Rabinovich’s musings on what she termed the “dark source,” or the hidden aspects of the world that hint at a deeper realm of knowledge and wisdom. This idea would inflect her work for the rest of her life.
“I have been repeatedly drawn to spaces of silence and darkness in which my work can transcend its materiality, and where I can access a primordial source of ideas and inspiration,” Rabinovich told the online magazine Frontera D in 2020.
The increasingly unstable political climate of Argentina, culminating in a military coup in 1966, forced Rabinovich to decamp to the United States with her husband and children the year after. They settled in Huntington, Long Island, where she joined the American Abstract Artists group, an organization founded by artists including Josef Albers and Alice Trumbull Mason.
In the ’70s, she experienced a dream in which her paintings transformed into transparent and free-standing sculptures, and began to bring them into existence. In “Tabletop Glass Sculpture (Untitled 1)” (1974), for instance, three adjoining dark-gray glass panes seem to deepen and lighten as planes overlap and separate while the viewer circumambulates.
A 1970 group show at the Caravan House Gallery titled 4 Argentine Artists Living in New York marked a turning point in the artist’s career. Throughout the ’70s, she showed at the Suffolk Museum Sculpture Garden, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Jewish Museum Sculpture Court.
After Rabinovich and Reissig divorced in 1979, she moved to a loft in Manhattan where she regularly hosted fellow artists. (The couple would rekindle their relationship in 1987.) In the ’80s, she began practicing Vipassana, a Buddhist form of meditation that emphasizes insight which in turn led to travels to South and Southeast Asia, including ancient ruins that inspired her to work in site-specific installations. These included “Point/Counterpoint” (1983), comprising panes of bronze-tempered glass set at odd angles that alternatively mirrored and obscured the buildings in the surrounding Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.
After moving to Rhinebeck in Upstate New York in the ’90s, Rabinovich became active in the art and Buddhist communities and began to engage more deeply with the natural environment, particularly the Hudson River. Her 2001–12 series Emergences takes the form of stone sculptures, some of which are still extant, installed along the banks of the river that are concealed and revealed by the tide’s rise and fall. River Library (2002–25) consists of mud adhered to scrolls of Essindia paper often arranged in an organic grid, which Rabinovich described as a take on ancient clay tablets — a form of that “dark source” come to light.
Rabinovich received the 2011–2012 Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement, and her work is held in the collections of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Her work has recently been shown in exhibitions at the Americas Society and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.
Rabinovich is survived by her children, Celia, Pedro, and Nora; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. “She was the matriarch of our family and an important member of the Hudson Valley Buddhist community,” one of her granddaughters, Lucia Reissig, told Hyperallergic in an email. “She had so many friends. She will be greatly missed.”
