Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (born 1945) is a British-born, Los Angeles-based New Abstractionist painter, art critic, theorist, and educator. His work questions traditional notions of aesthetic beauty in relation to an informed dialogue on the purpose of painting in post-Modernism, particularly the desertion of beauty within post-1970’s contemporary art for cultural signifiers (class division, the corruption of artists, anti-western sentiment, gender, race, sexuality, etc.). His work attempts to deconstruct the notion of cultural object-making (a form considered low art) by referencing the aesthetic art historical roots of high art and beauty as the legitimate discourse—a bold faced rejection, in his own words, of the “revisionist and de-aestheticised version of the past.” Gilbert-Rolfe’s work has been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, NY; The Getty, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. He has been honored by National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for his contributions to painting and criticism and was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient (in painting). In 1998 he was presented the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism by the College Art Association. Rolfe has authored several books and essays, including Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (Allworth Press, 2000) and Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986–1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
