Brian Rutenberg

Brian Rutenberg's paintings reinvigorate and revitalize the medium. Raised in the South Carolina lowlands, Rutenberg has lived and worked in New York for the past 20 years. His work elicits a profoundly visceral experience as he reinvests abstraction with a sense of spirituality. Influenced by the music of Glenn Gould and Celtic culture, as well as the painters Joan Mitchell and Hans Hoffman, Rutenberg draws on the landscape that he remembers from childhood, growing up between Pawley's Island and Charletson, where the rivers and lakes join the ocean. The landscape, complex in its layers, has guided Rutenberg's approach to composition and color. This volume is the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date; it includes an essay by critic and writer Martica Sawin and a foreword by artist and writer Gregory Amenoff.