Barry Whistler Gallery is pleased to announce Andrea Rosenberg: Paintings, a solo exhibition of new works. The exhibition will open on September 19th, 2026, with a reception from 11am-2pm and will remain on view through October 31st, 2026. This exhibition features a dozen new paintings and marks Rosenberg’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of work consists of large scale horizontally oriented paintings.
In the brochure accompanying this exhibition, Lana S. Meador’s (Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art) essay addresses Rosenberg’s process...
“The idea of an improvisational journey, and its resolution, connects the work of jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and visual artist Andrea Rosenberg, whose new paintings reverberate with intuitive energy. Whether it be music or painting, the creation of an improvisatory artwork can seem effortless, second nature. In fact, it is the result of deep experience that is internalized, distilled, and enacted with expert ease by the artist. It is rooted in experimentation and risk. In a 2002 essay on Rosenberg’s work, David Galloway identified the “parallels between Monk’s structured, sometimes dissonant improvisations” and Rosenberg’s drawings, recounting the artist’s formative memory of hearing Monk perform at Carnegie Hall in 1965. The dialogue between Rosenberg and Monk resonates even louder in the artist’s new body of work, which denotes a shift in her practice and an ongoing commitment to experimentation.
The union between music and abstract painting harks back to Wassily Kandinsky’s pioneering abstractions in the early twentieth century that demonstrate his experience with synesthesia, of seeing color when hearing music and vice versa. Even without Kandinsky’s neurological condition, color is evocative. Whereas Rosenberg’s earlier drawings might suggest the sparse tonality of Erik Satie, the recent paintings are more akin to Monk’s bebop. A restrained palette has given way to a broader range of comingling colors in forms that oscillate between nebulous and defined. Even when large swaths of white, gray, or black are employed, they are colored by the many layers beneath them.
Each painting presents an archaeology with overlapping veils of pigment and pentimenti that make evident the artist’s shifting thoughts and actions. In Untitled #44, turquoise underpainting and a flash of red orange peek out from behind a saturated, dripping white cloud. A series of vaguely rectilinear forms progress from pale tones of flax and hay to a mossy green. Below, deeper verdant greens are subsumed in a fury of black creating an invigorating discordance like the atonal clash of two notes playing at the same time. In a significant change, the verticality of Rosenberg’s earlier oeuvre has yielded to a horizontal format, which can lend itself to topographical associations, or perhaps the interior landscape in the mind’s eye.
Born in Brooklyn, Rosenberg attended the Art Students League in New York as a teenager during the 1960s. The influential art school, which still operates today, was famed for its student-centered model and nondogmatic methodology. During the first half of twentieth century, it served as a creative breeding ground for the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement with Hans Hofmann as an instructor and students Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock, among others, many who shared the spirit of jazz in their work. Spontaneity, improvisation, and experimentation were explored through the languages of music and painting in each of these uniquely American art forms.
The Abstract Expressionist approach to painting (that is, gestural and improvisational) is relevant to Rosenberg’s new paintings, which she executes while working on the floor or wall, where intersecting forms are defined by energetic gestures and painterly drips. The artist’s meandering line traverses above, under, and through vibrating fields of color. Nothing is static. A rhythm develops between forms that feel fast, and those more languid—a result of the breadth of brushes, drawing tools, and media she utilizes.The work rewards close looking to take in the nuance of her abundant brushstrokes, daubs, and drips. All this reflects the many choices made ad hoc in the studio; a call-and-response where there are no wrong notes. Like Monk, Rosenberg’s compositions are comprised of many parts that come together in sometimes cacophonous ways but achieve a sense of equilibrium, a moment of simplicity and resolve. The paintings demonstrate the artist’s internalized skill of “knowing when to stop” that comes with the fluency of crafting your own visual language.
At midcentury, Abstract Expressionism signaled an interiority in response to the trauma of the Great Depression and Second World War, coupled with innovative modernist approaches to process and form. Today, gestural abstraction is still a powerful statement, particularly amidst the onslaught of AI slop and the frenzy of our mediated visual culture. It records a lived experience in ways that cannot be replicated by technological means. It is a respite that reinvigorates the viewer to delight in the act of looking because of its embodied making—and Rosenberg’s new work does just that.”