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American painter (1940–2023) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barbara Rossi (September 20, 1940 – August 24, 2023) was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group that in the 1960s and 1970s turned to representational art. She first exhibited with them at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1969. She is known for meticulously rendered drawings and cartoonish paintings, as well as a personal vernacular. She worked primarily by making reverse paintings on plexiglass that reference lowbrow and outsider art.
Rossi was a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[1] Her works are exhibited in several permanent art museum collections.
Barbara Rossi was born in Chicago on September 20, 1940,[2] and lived in Berwyn, Illinois. She received her Bachelor of Arts from St. Xavier College in 1964.[3] Before pursuing her career as an artist, she spent several years as a Catholic nun.
Rossi's drawing style began to emerge in 1967, while she was taking a course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She exhibited a drawing in the 1968 Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity at the Art Institute of Chicago, and later that year, she entered the Master of Fine Arts program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1970.[3] While there, she met other Imagist artists, and was soon exhibiting her work alongside theirs.[4] Rossi was awarded an artist's fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972.[5]
During the period of the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Rossi's art dealt with themes of abstracted and stylized inner bodily awareness, and the media she used included painting on plexiglass, small drawings in graphite and colored pencil, quilts and quilt pictures. This more internally-focused work shifted to a more external viewpoint in the late 1970s, when she began representing situational images and whole figures. By the late 1970s, she also employed other media, painting on masonite and occasionally canvas. In 1983, Rossi started traveling to India and making elaborate colored pencil drawings with Persian and Indian themes.[6] Rossi curated a traveling exhibition about Indian art, From the Ocean of Painting: A Survey of India's Popular Painting Traditions, 1589 A.D. to the Present and wrote the accompanying catalog.[7]
Rossi described her technique as "drawing without a predetermined end,"[8] intending her drawings to emerge one form at a time.[9] Many people thought of Rossi's art as odd and grotesque[citation needed], and most of her paintings appear to be body parts from the inside out, often looking like knobs or folds of skin.[10] Ken Johnson calls her paintings "X-rays revealing subdermal viscera," which he suggests resemble "churning inner souls".[11]
Rossi died on August 24, 2023, at the age of 82.[12]
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