Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, First Floor
Main Building
This exhibition will explore the art of one of the premier abstract painters to work in Philadelphia in the twentieth century, bringing together a selection of approximately 30 exemplary paintings from the years 1972–1993. Warren Rohrer: Paintings 1972–1993 will be the first museum presentation of the artist’s work.
The exhibition begins with Rohrer’s paintings of the early 1970s, when he first adopted the grid as the underlying framework for his work, and first made the imaginative connection between the culture of farming and the techniques of painting—a link that resonated in his mature work. In the early 1980s the grid-based substructure that he developed for these works gave way to a vividly colored and richly layered approach, and the work became increasingly luminous.