Dorothea Rockburne: In My Mind's Eye

Dorothea Rockburne (born 1932) came to prominence in the late 1960s with Minimalist-inflected works pitched somewhere between painting and sculpture, that employed such materials as cardboard, sheet metal and crude oil. In the early 1950s Rockburne had studied at Black Mountain College with the mathematician Max Dehn, an encounter that helped to direct her early basis in Minimalism towards investigations of, among other themes, the Golden Section, the solar system and the writings of Pascal. This volume, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, assesses Rockburne's career in the context of her peers such as Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, and elucidates the philosophical foundations of her abiding commitment to abstraction as a thinking tool. It includes works ranging from classic installation pieces such as "Scalar" (1971) and the folded paper Locus Etchings (1972) to the recent Astronomy Drawings (2009-2010).