Gilbert-Rolfe has shown in New York fairly regularly since 1970, and sporadically elsewhere. Regarding the general consensus that describes his work as "Geometric Abstraction," Gilbert-Rolfe says he wishes people would think about what he does with the category rather than how his work fits into it. He says he went to an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London in 1963 to see the Pop art that was in it but what caught his attention instead, causing him to decide he needed to go to America, were the paintings of the New York School and especially and specifically Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The space in it felt as active as the space in Howard Hawks’ Red River, which had entered his imagination when he was a child and stayed there. Rachel Kushner discusses his indebtedness to Newman and Hawks, and much else in the work and practice, going on to say that she made an “automatic and instinctive” association of his painting Hottest Part of the Day with a poem of Sappho's, and that it is her “sense that Gilbert-Rolfe has some uncanny mesh with feminine sensibilities… electric verdure pulses—seductive, then bewildering, then seductive. Boucher, then radiator coolant, then Boucher.” Flattered by Kushner's suggestion, he is however inclined to resist her further suggestion that “A line is a kind of violence, cutting the canvas as though it’s cutting a body. But color is violence as well, if of a soft, smothering sort. A smothering of reason.” Aside from wondering whether a drawn line doesn't only divide but also connect, he is unwilling to accept the smothering of reason part. He says “his paintings are about complexity and as such have come to be about logic as much as anything else. Not logic as in philosophy, logic as in music, where one talks of it making sense but does not mean it provides a riddle and its answer. I want the work to interact with the viewer, to take place in the space around itself and between itself and the person looking at it, and to hold the attention for some time.” He has also said that seriousness is generally identified with terror, “but I want to identify it with questions of the formless… Art has to put you in touch with something that’s not manageable…. it’s time to get rid of … tough-guy rhetoric about the sublime. Among other things, it would permit us to get closer to the sublime or sublimes that tough guys are too scared to touch.” As Kushner puts it, “Gilbert-Rolfe … lays out his ante, but never knows where a painting will go.” In 2010 he and Rebecca Norton began to work together as the collaboration Awkward x 2, making paintings together and also writing occasional blogs. Awkward has shown in Brooklyn, Chicago and Louisville to date.
Art Criticism and Theory
Gilbert-Rolfe writes about art and related topics, including poetry, fiction, fashion, with particular regard to its interaction with photography, technology, and the general state of things in art and how the present situation seems to have emerged. His publications include two anthologies of his essays, a book about Frank Gehry's architecture co-authored with the architect, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, and other essays and reviews.' Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime reformulates the traditional definition of the differential relationship between beauty and the sublime, in which beauty is a sign of the passive and feminine and the sublime of the active and male—heroic or terrifying depending on one’s perspective, or of course both. In Gilbert-Rolfe’s version Winckelmann’s masculine active becomes instead androgynous transitivity, while intransitivity replaces passivity as a still entirely feminine characteristic, the feminine as intransitivity being a sign or force that stands for, or embodies, power as a kind of powerlessness. As well as redefining the differential, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime''’s argument also relocates the sublime from nature to technology, and with it subjectivity, from wherever it imagined itself to be to within techno-capitalism. Here and elsewhere Gilbert-Rolfe suggests that techno-capitalism and the subjectivity that accompanies it are largely made out of all that Heidegger warns against and denounces in his post-war essays on technology, for example the telephone's capacity to sever the mutual dependence of space and time. He has returned to some aspects of this argument in two essays in particular. Starting out in Artforum, in 1973, he has written something at least once for most of the art magazines over the years, and more often for Critical Inquiry and Bomb. A founding editor of October, with Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson and Lucio Pozzi Gilbert-Rolfe resigned from the journal after the third issue.
Honors
For painting, Gilbert-Rolfe has been honored by two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship the Francis Greenberger Award and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship He was awarded an NEA fellowship in criticism in 1974 and was the 1998 recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art and Architectural Criticism.
Teaching
Gilbert-Rolfe retired from teaching at Art Center College of Design in 2015 receiving the title Professor/Chair Emeritus. He had worked there since 1986, when he was hired to develop an MFA program for the school; before that he taught at Princeton and Cal Arts.
