Dorothea Rockburne, photographed by Jeannette Montgomery.
The sixth-ever issue of Art-Rite, a downtown art magazine published on newsprint by Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn between 1973 and 1978, featured a limited edition folded cover by the artist Dorothea Rockburne. Exactly 50 years later, Robinson still remembers the piece well. “To me, it’s the essence of a Dorothea Rockburne,” he told the now 95-year-old artist when the two got together in New York City earlier this month. “It was fantastic and I wanted to express my gratitude.” Decades and decades into their illustrious careers, both Rockburne and Robinson are still working steadily. The former, in fact, just headlined the very first European survey of her work at London’s Bernheim Gallery. The Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Has Not Understood It, curated by Lola Kramer and on view through January 2025, showcases dozens of her works completed between the years 1967 and 2013, ratifying Rockburne’s status as one of the 21st century’s most imaginative and cerebral contemporary artists. But fame, she told Robinson, was “never something I wanted.” In fact, she adds, “I’ve avoided it.” Below, she and Robinson, whose collection of art criticism will be published by Edgewise Press early next year, take part in a wide-ranging conversation about their lives and respective artistic practices, touching on everything from their earliest encounters with Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol (“he wanted to know how to be famous”) to the influence of mathematics on Rockburne’s work and the fundamentally erotic nature of artmaking. “Art is sexual,” Rockburne claims, “and that’s very hard to talk about because this is a culture which completely perverts sex, in my opinion.”