EIGHT, 1966 (later retitled Blue, Red, Green & Yellow)

The Artist's Wooden Palette & Metal Paint Pans Boxed
61x91x7cm
Comprehensive cataloguing and price available on request

• Eight is one of the first examples of an output alluding to the creative process and the alchemy of paint, that became known as the Studio Boxes.
• In " recognising " an object and being inwardly touched by it, Rothenstein was compelled to put it to an imaginative purpose.
• Rothenstein collaborates with the object creating conditions for it to " speak with a different voice " and assume a poetic and symbolic life.
• Rothenstein creates a symmetrically balanced composition, using found objects used as materials of studio practice presented as emblematic of art.
• Rothenstein is acknowledged as Britain's most innovative printmaker and his boxes directly relate to his printmaking.
• Eight is part of a deeply poetic impulse to imaginative transformation, by which objects and events are re-defined by new relations to each other and the viewer.
• The poignancy of the real object is quite different from something painted. It expresses a history independent of the picture, even when it is separated from the onlooker by glass front of a box.
• Rothenstein viewed 'The Studio' as a microcosmic image of the world. In Eight he repurposes a found piece of wood and the two ovals within it were probably created by him so he could use it as a paint palette or an object for his printmaking. The palette and paint pans are Rothenstein's artistic tools and the accoutrements of his Studio.
• In transforming these objects from tools used to create art into the art itself, Rothenstein is on another level suggesting them as metaphors for the instruments and actions by which human realities are made. These everyday objects were used in the Studio the home of his oeuvre, where creative expression leads to revelation becoming the laboratory of the imagination
• Rothenstein's palette and paint pans take on a different meaning when they are encased and no longer handled, now they are only visibly tangible. We know they are real, but we view them very differently to objects being used in The Studio, Now they are seen in the way that we look at composition in a painted picture. Yet they retain the character and mystic of their history prior to being encased.

LITERATURE :
Illustrated & discussed in Michael Rothenstein's boxes, by Mel Gooding, page 5, 7, no 33

PROVENANCE :
Private Collection, Paisnell Gallery, Hamilton Galleries, London

EXHIBITED:
Michael Rothenstein's Boxes, Royal Academy February-March 1992, Cat 10

THE ARTIST
• Michael Rothenstein is internationally renowned as one of the most innovative and influential, modernist printmakers, but he was also a painter and began to experiment with construction boxes in the 1960's.
• Rothenstein collected found objects and used them for painting and printmaking, each object remaining in the studio until a relationship and a purpose was revealed.
• Often objects were used first for printmaking, reused for constructions and boxes, sometimes more than once, and then, in their turn, printed upon.
• The objects express their history prior to being found, used and boxed, revealing the ongoing stimulation of a creative studio.
• Michael Rothenstein's boxes reveal the workings of a remarkable creative imagination, tensely alert to the vibrancy of the phenomenal world, open to modern experience in all its diversity.