Circa 1998 Jeffrey Rothstein, Flora Fauna Series Vintage Color Photograph

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FLORA & FAUNA SERIES, c.1998, Fuji crystal archive paper. Unsigned.

Photographer Jeffrey Rothstein focuses on different elements within Nature for … Read more FLORA & FAUNA SERIES, c.1998, Fuji crystal archive paper. Unsigned.

Photographer Jeffrey Rothstein focuses on different elements within Nature for his subject matter, ranging from flowers and plants to desert sands as well as the ocean and stars. Taking these varied images he distorts them through a series of photographic cross processes to create surreal otherworldly effects transforming the real into unreal visions that are extremely vivid, colorful and abstracted. “Jeffrey’s powerful body of work demonstrates the vast beauty of his compositions and his eye for rich color and sensual forms. He has created a thematic architecture with his work, a way of thinking about photography that is perfectly of the moment, alive to its unique technology; film with the use of digital printing and the conceptual possibilities of painterly abstraction.”
Jerome Liebling, Founder of the photography program and professor emeritus of Hampshire College. Jeffrey studied photography under the post war New York School photographers, Jerry Liebling and Elaine Mays and painting with Arthur Hoener, an early Op Art painter and student of Josef Albers at Hampshire College in the early 80’s. Post college, The Whitney Independent Study Program studying with guest artists Richard Serra and Brice Marden. Jeffrey Rothstein trained in fashion photography as an assistant to modern master Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Kei Ogata and Dominique Isserman. His first professional assignment was an on-going project photographing Jean-Paul Gaultier in the latter’s Paris studio as he documented the creation of his collections. He then went on to work for Condé Nast shooting from the streets of New York and Paris, to the beaches of the Caribbean.
However his heart and soul has always been in making art. After 10 years working editorially he segued seamlessly into the art world when Paul Morris of the Paul Morris Gallery invited him to show a series of underwater nudes at his Chelsea gallery.
Jeffrey’s diverse body of work deals with evocative meditations on the nexus of painting and photography as well as the themes of art history with respect to specific periods of painting and the contemporary art world itself. His photographic work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, which are researched at length before embarking on to a specific location to photograph. His earlier work was shot on film, scanned, and balanced digitally before printing. With his newer series, Heavenly Bodies and Oblique Strategies, he forgoes a camera all together and creates his images entirely using digital capture.
For his Zion Canyon/Plateaux of Mirrors series, he studied with a professor of Chinese Art history and a curator of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum for two years focusing on scroll paintings of the Tang and Song dynasties. This body of work is not about photographing the actual appearance of the natural world. Instead, Jeffrey distills his impressions as did the painters of the Song Dynasty to create works that idealize the natural world and emphasize the graphic qualities that enable him to translate nature into an essential impressionistic medium that conveys the energy and spirit of the landscape in a painterly abstract form.
For his newest series, Oblique Strategies, he continues his examination of painterly space. Making works that are both bold in their simplicity and geometric forms as his visual vocabulary is drawn from his love of geometric abstract art of the 1960’s and 70’s. Along with his passion for geometric forms of that era he then used black and white erotic images over-layed with colourful geometric forms to create the Heavenly Bodies series.
Born in Northampton, Massachusetts. He spent his early years in the Caribbean, attended secondary school in London but has always called New York City home.

BA- Hampshire College, Amherst Ma. 1982

The Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program (ISP) NY 1984


EXHIBITIONS
•Kasher/Potamkin Gallery, Chelsea NYC
•The Tarn Collection/ Zion Mandala, England
•Lu Magnus Gallery/What the Thunder Said, New, NY
•Susan Eley Gallery/Blaze, New York, NY
•Unwrap Gallery/Mie Gakure, Tokyo, Japan
•The New Erotic Museum, Los Angeles, Ca
•Boltax Gallery- Summer Girls, Shelter Island, NY
•The Tarn Collection, London, England
•Saibu Gallery/Summer’s Soft Song-Tokyo, Japan
•Baron/Boisante- Trippy World ,New York, NY
•Jason McCoy Gallery-Kansas City, MO
•Paul Morris Gallery-New York, NY-The Armory Show See less