Rosemarie Castoro

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Rosemarie Castoro  Y and Interference Paintings, 1964/1985. For the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery since 1989, we will revisit a body of work from the beginning of her career with five paintings and a sculpture.

In 1964-65 Castoro was making allover abstraction of gestural but tightly packed tile-like shapes which evolved into a basic “Y” unit, and then into beams of light intersecting and weaving in space. - Lucy R. Lippard, 1975

The paintings began when Rosemarie Castoro was in her mid-twenties and a recent graduate of Pratt Institute. Working with 8 foot square canvases and using the Y shape as the organizing principle, she created works with an all-over interlocking patterning effect, resembling a brightly colored mosaic of cobblestones. As these works evolved the shapes and edges of the Y shape became more active and broke apart. The compositions and color also became more subtle and the lines began to interfere with one another. From this progression, the Interference paintings emerged as a distinct body of work. Castoro spoke about both the Y and Interference paintings to Alex Bacon in the Brooklyn Rail, about a year before her death in 2015. He begins by asking her where these early paintings come from:

They’re from Y’s. It’s from looking at the Y and structuring the Y and seeing the edges—then I started making things happen with the edges. They start slicing through each other, interfering with each other, which is my series called “Interference.” These are some parts of the Y’s, big Y’s, that would overlap and interfere and then I didn’t paint at all. I made it into a flat object by eliminating some of the places where they overlapped. So, it’s just a matter of keeping my mind occupied with structure.

Castoro worked across mediums, including Conceptual art, street works, concrete poetry and Post-Minimalist sculpture. Dance and performance were a vital aspect of Castoro’s work, and she was one of the first to link dance to minimalism and conceptual art. Her interest in dance began at Pratt where she was president of their budding dance workshop, she also participated in some of Yvonne Rainer’s early performances. Dance and choreography remained a touchstone of her work, and is clearly palpable in her sculpture.

From the 1970s until the final years of her life, Castoro focused on sculptural experimentation. Many were made from sheets of aluminum, folded, crumpled and related to the human form and movement. For the exhibition we will present an exemplifying piece titled The Princess, made from a single torched aluminum sheet, shaped and worked into a free-standing form.

Rosemarie Castoro was born in Brooklyn in 1939. From 1966 until her death in 2015 she lived and worked on Spring Street in Soho. Recent major posthumous solo exhibitions have been held at MAK – Museum of Applied Arts (2023), Vienna, Judd Foundation (2023), Thaddeaus Ropac, London (2022), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva (2019), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2017). Recent notable group exhibitions have been Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Action, Gesture, Performance: Feminism, the Body and Abstraction, Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Sign Language, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna,

Rosemarie Castoro had eleven previous solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery beginning in 1971 and first appeared at the gallery in 1966 in a group exhibition titled Distillation which was curated by EC Goossen, co-hosted by Tibor de Nagy and Stable Galleries, New York. .