Raquel Rabinovich 1929-2025
By Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig, PhD
Images courtesy of Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York
Raquel Rabinovich (Z" L) passed away on January 5, 2025, at 95, in Rhinebeck, New York, where she resided for the last 30 years. She was an active member of the Hudson Valley artistic and Buddhist communities.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1929, into a Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrant family, she was raised in Córdoba. She initially pursued studies at the Universidad de Córdoba (1953). She later traveled to Europe, where she studied at the Atelier André Lhote and La Sorbonne in Paris, France (1957), and Edinburgh University in Scotland. She returned to Argentina and began her artistic career in the 1960s. In 1967, Raquel arrived in New York after being released from prison, where she had been detained for expressing her political views, critical of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina at the time.
Her imprisonment had a significant impact on her life and her work. It led her to explore what she called “the light of darkness." Her early series of paintings titled The Dark is Light Enough (1960s) marked the beginning of a lifelong investigation into the nature of existence by exploring what she called the “dark source." She believed that "There is a difference between blackness and darkness. A dark place invites one to investigate, dig in, and know more, as it is difficult to see in the dark, literally and metaphorically. It is a way of going deeper and deeper into dark places as a source of wisdom and knowledge, which is well known in mythology.” She recalls that while working on this series, she was gifted a book entitled The Dark is Light Enough by Christopher Fry. The title struck her and realizing that it perfectly embodied the meaning of her new paintings, she decided to use it for her paintings.
Throughout her seven-decade career, Raquel worked across various mediums, including glass sculpture, installations in nature, and film. However, her primary and career-long engagement was with painting and works on paper. By the 1980s, she had perfected her signature built-up monochromatic surfaces, and she often embedded subtle gestures using language, which extended from her lifelong love of literature and poetry.
As an artist, she never ceased to innovate and capture the viewer's attention with her pictorial work. As art critic Alberto Barral noted in a review of the exhibition Portals at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary in New York (2021), “Raquel Rabinovich’s exhibition (…) is a revelation, as to how much her monochromatic works, some of which are also inscribed, can reveal of the meditative process in art making. Raquel has traveled extensively in the Himalayan countries, and the serenity of her work permeates a strong connection with Eastern philosophy and meditation practice, which has influenced her aesthetics and her particular approach to the process of making art. The title of the exhibition, ‘Portals,’ aptly underlines that her works are much like windows into unknown territory, a series of openings from which to perceive the visible and the hidden. What lies beneath the surface in these works has an integral repercussion into what that final layer conveys.”
Raquel wanted to create site-specific works in actual space, especially in natural environments. Her interventions included glass environments, stone sculpture installations arranged along the Hudson Riverbed, and her longstanding series on paper, the River Library, which utilized mud she collected with her friends from various rivers worldwide. Regarding this aspect of her practice, Barral indicates: “She started making these pieces when climate change was not yet a concern, but they acquire new meaning now when it's evident that water levels are on their way to definitely new levels. It may also explain why we have not been aware of this talented artist's work for so long. This type of work practice strongly relates to Earth Art, a movement that was an offshoot from Minimalism and what can now, in retrospect, be seen as the beginnings of the environmental movement, which came forth in opposition to the rampant commoditization of American art in the late 1960s. These ideas and works were, to varying degrees, divorced from the art market and similar to the Italian movement Arte Povera, which also was a reaction against the commercialization of art, placing a strong emphasis on simple, non-elaborated materials.”
It was not uncommon for her to include literary references in her work. She was particularly fond of Jorge Luis Borges, and excerpts of his writings or references to his concepts, such as the labyrinths, came up regularly in her paintings and drawings, as illustrated in When Silence Becomes Poetry 2: for Jorge Luis Borges (2018) is composed with mud from the river Danube on Essindia paper.
Over her seventy-year career, Raquel was concerned with making the invisible visible. She was interested in many topics, including spirituality, mythology, life, nature, and transcendence. In psychology, transcendence is a state of being beyond standard understanding and experience. It also refers to a perspective that allows people to view themselves and the world around them with acceptance and a sense of connection.
Raquel's spiritual approach to art was genuinely unique. She never subscribed to specific movements or trends in art. She engaged from her unique perspective with some of the dominant tendencies of the twentieth century, including hard-edge abstraction and land art. She leaves a rich legacy as a visual artist and a host of teachings and memories to those lucky enough to call her their friend.
