WINSTON ROETH
WINSTON ROETH
ENQUIRE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Winston Roeth is less a painter of colour as he is a painter of sensation
– Andrew Jensen
I was introduced to Winston back in 1996. His studio was on a third-floor walk-up in Little Italy, right above the famed Café Roma. It was a bustling and relentlessly noisy neighbourhood in the heart of the Lower East Side and it couldn’t have felt more Manhattan. I was lucky enough to stay there many times on my subsequent visits to NYC, and though Winston has since moved north to the more patient and civilized Hudson Valley, Emma and I often find ourselves walking past Café Roma and looking up at Winston’s old windows – swimming in nostalgia and happy memories.
In the late 90s, the apartment was given over almost entirely to ‘the arts’. Winston’s wife, Susan Osberg, is a notable choreographer and dancer, and Winston was painting full-time. This devotion to work meant that the zone for entertaining and living was compressed into a humble, shaker-like space that separated studios at either end of the apartment. All the windows were covered in a soft glycine paper which didn’t exactly reduce the hubbub of the city, but it kept much of the visual noise at bay. And that is what Winston has been doing all these years since…keeping visual noise at bay, whilst giving colour the clarity of an exquisitely held note.
Light and dark, dry and wet, reflective and absorptive, these qualities give the different multiples of the painting a distinct visual rhythm. (…) The rhythms change with the light and with the position and movements of the viewer.
– Winston Roeth
Special collectors all around the world have recognized this gift in Winston. There are many discreet collections in Europe, America, Japan, Korea and Australasia where his work is held in depth. It’s that kind of painting – filled with sensuality, whose immersive generosity functions as an antidote to the anxiety and endless clamour that marks so much of this fraught moment in the world.
You can find Roeth’s works in the collections of MoMA, The Albright Knox Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Weisbaden and Benesse House, Naoshima. Alongside these collections there have been site-specific commissions and installations such as that in Sassuolo Italy, where Roeth was commissioned by the Panza Collection to paint eleven permanent works for the Palazzo Ducale.
EXHIBITIONS
American-born (b.1945, Chicago) Winston Roeth splits his time between his studio in Beacon, New York and Waldoboro, Maine. He has studied at the University of Illinois and the University of New Mexico in the United States and at the Royal College of Art in London. Roeth’s works have been well-collected internationally and are found in the collections of MoMA, The Albright Knox Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Weisbaden and Benesse House in Naoshima, Japan. Alongside these collections there have been site-specific commissions and installations such as that in Sassuolo Italy, where Roeth was commissioned by the Panza Collection to paint eleven permanent works for the Palazzo Ducale.
Image below:
Winston Roeth, In a Silent Way, 2012, Kremer pigments with polyurethane dispersion, cellulose and water on aluminium core board panels, 4565 x 4264 mm
ANZ Building. Collection of AMP Collection, New Zealand
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