Rodney Carswell

Rodney Carswell (born 1946) is an American abstract artist. He first gained recognition for human-scaled, geometric paintings that feature exposed, projected support structures, creating interplay between sculptural presence and richly painted pictorial surfaces. His recent paintings eschew the superstructures and evoke a greater sense of immediacy, playfulness, and narrative. Critics often describe Carswell's work as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate "in-between" spaces and embrace contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front. Employing irregularly shaped canvasses, thick supports, and openings or holes that reveal the stretcher construction and walls behind them, works like 3 (In 4) often occupy a place between painting and sculpture. In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernist languages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories with postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and with his process-oriented, "hand-made" surfaces. In his essay for Carswell's mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their way into one's consciousness in a "supple, somewhat unsettling manner" that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception. such as Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, and the New Art Examiner, and major publications including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. He has been recognized with fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim and Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1980, the Carswells moved to New York City, where they worked various blue-collar jobs and Renee gave birth to their daughter, Calida, in 1983. Later that year, they returned to the Midwest when he secured a position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he would teach art and serve in several administrative capacities, until retiring in 2007.

Throughout this period, Carswell showed regularly, at galleries including Roy Boyd (Chicago and Los Angeles), Linda Durham (New Mexico), Feigen, Thomas McCormick, and Devening Projects (all three Chicago). His work was featured in museums throughout the United States, including these major shows: Corcoran Gallery 44th Biennial, "Painting Outside of Painting" (1995); MCA Chicago, "Art in Chicago 1945-95" (1996); and Terra Museum, "Surfaces: Two Decades of Chicago Painting" (1987).

In 1998, the Carswells opened a Latino-flavored restaurant in his former studio space, called Flo, that they operated until late 2011, when Carswell returned to his roots in New Mexico. Rodney Carswell, Martha, acrylic and rhoplex on canvas, 65" x 68", 1977.

Carswell has said that "reductive abstraction" has been integral to his work dating back to his art education in the late 1960s, when iconic minimalists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman were at their most influential. Ultimately, he felt a greater kinship with artists identified as post-minimalists, such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Graves and Joel Shapiro, preferring their idiosyncratic styles of abstraction and engagement with the body, the hand-crafted and process over minimalism's embrace of non-referentiality and the mechanical. In interviews, Carswell has said he was "trying to get the human element more in evidence" and making "visible the way an artist—myself, in this case—has behaved toward the object. The idea is to have the nature of the material and the act performed on the material both be evident in the object that results." Carswell also engaged the paintings as objects, in terms of their unconventional shapes and thin, minimal presence without stretcher bars. By the late 1970s, influenced by the work of Ron Gorchov, he decided to explore this issue in a more robust way, leading to a breakthrough in his work. —or displaying both backs and fronts of painted panels, as in 3 (5) Panels, Presented and Reversed (1993). David Pagel concluded that Carswell's "randomly off-balanced and rigorously geometric" configurations were profoundly resistant to rational explanation, calling them "tight organizations that defy logic yet make sense."

Teaching Carswell taught for over thirty years, beginning in 1972 as an assistant professor at Illinois State University (ISU) in Normal, Illinois. He worked there alongside colleagues such as Ken Holder, Harold Gregor and Ron Jackson, earning tenure in 1979, before leaving the next year for New York City. After the birth of his daughter Calida, in 1983, Carswell returned to teaching at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). At UIC, he joined an ambitious studio arts faculty that included Martin Puryear, Charles Wilson, Julia Fish, Tony Tasset, and Phyllis Bramson. In 1998, he and his wife Renee opened a Latino-flavored restaurant in his former studio space on West Chicago Avenue called Flo, pioneering the underserved, pre-development Noble Square neighborhood just northwest of Chicago's downtown. The restaurant was known for its eclectic menu, diverse intellectual community, and notable art. National Endowment for the Arts (1991), Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts (1998), and Illinois Arts Council (1985), as well as with awards from the Art Institute of Chicago (Viehler Award, 1973; and Pauline Palmer Prize, 1990) and a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Grant.

His work has been purchased by numerous private art collections and public collections including those of the: Art Institute of Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (University of Oklahoma), Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College), Illinois State Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Miami University Art Museum, Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Arkansas Art Center, Art Museum of West Virginia University, Mulvane Art Museum, and DePaul Art Museum.