6. Alicia Rothman - Bull

2024
Oil on wood panel
12.7 x 17.78 cm

Alicia Rothman is an American artist whose work explores landscape, mythology and environmental change through painting, drawing and collage. Her recent Uninhabited Landscapes series reflects on the effects of climate change, combining expressive mark-making with carefully constructed figurative and symbolic elements.

In her Kite Flyers works, Rothman introduces human presence into previously unpopulated landscapes. Using hand-cut stencils inspired by the small animated figures found in the paintings of Francesco Guardi, she depicts tiny figures engaged in everyday activities, suspended between the natural world and mythological space. Her practice balances spontaneity and control: gestural brush and reed-pen marks suggest movement and atmosphere, while painstakingly cut and assembled collage elements create static yet uncanny animal archetypes.

Rothman completed an MFA at Indiana University Bloomington in 1985, following studies at Hunter College and Harper College in New York State during the 1970s.

Recent exhibitions include Seen and Unseen at The Painting Center (2026), exhibitions with Susan Eley Fine Art and Thomas Deans Fine Art, Atlanta, and Tikkun Olam at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art (2025). Rothman also exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2013 and 2015. Earlier in her career she held solo and group exhibitions at Dillon Gallery in New York between 1998 and 2006.

Her awards and commissions include a Ford Foundation Grant, a Visiting Artist residency at the American Academy in Rome (2025), the commission to design the Hampton Classic poster (2003), and work for the White House Easter Display representing New York State in 2002.

Her work is held in collections including the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary and numerous private and corporate collections.