In what has come to be considered by many as the era of the woman, the art world has just lost 1 of our most powerful matriarchs, Susan Rothenberg. The era began without her noticing. She understood the political complexities of gender, but she was too decorated in her head and in her painting. 'I recollect hard piece of work makes art, not gender. I think fine art gets to a more than guttural level,' she told me years ago.

Few artists work harder than Susan Rothenberg did. A single mother for much of her early on career, she painted in split shifts – during the twenty-four hours when her daughter Maggie was at school, and at nighttime. For her, painting was the holy grail of image-making. However, like other painters of her generation in New York – Neil Jenney, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Moskowitz, Jennifer Bartlett ­– she was searching for a mode to release it from the ethereal fog of Colour Field painting and the obdurate, static condition of minimalism.

Wishbone (1979), Susan Rothenberg. Anderson Collection at Stanford University

Wishbone (1979), Susan Rothenberg. Anderson Drove at Stanford University.Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York; © 2020 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS)

When her first, massive horse paintings emerged in 1975, exhibited at the alternative SoHo gallery 112 Greene Street, she had clearly hit on something that resonated. Today, they hang in museums, equally representative of a moment when abstraction would exist forced to finally brand room for new forms and identities, including those of women. And as it turns out, information technology was important that those horses were painted by a small, psychologically tough woman who recognised that this motif was a vehicle towards something deeper, and would shortly be expendable. Many of her colleagues, mostly male, would have ridden those horses to the terminate of their careers, cashing in on a recognisable brand. Rothenberg later acknowledged, 'One thing that I do remember is a departure between men and women is that women by and large get places that are deeper and messier than men, who generally want to brand things coherent and iconic.'

Numerous writers, including myself, have explained Rothenberg's horses stylistically, a painterly bridge between her minimalist elders and the new figuration her work would inspire in the late 1970s and '80s. Merely Rothenberg's work was never about style. If they are anything in the vicinity of mode, they are powerfully expressionist. When I think well-nigh Rothenberg's piece of work at present, I think of emotion. Fifty-fifty the horses accept their human side, sometimes messy and even awkward. They run and jump and fall down. If you lot look closely, some drool and cry. 1 wears a bathrobe. Nosotros are drawn to these beings non only for their powerful grace, merely also for their flaws. Some of the horses are turned from a profile image to a frontal i, exposing night, homo-like spectres moving toward the states.

Blue Head (1980–81), Susan Rothenberg. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Bluish Head (1980–81), Susan Rothenberg. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York; © 2020 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Order (ARS)

The horses were a launching indicate for Rothenberg's singular body of psychological figuration, unlike anything else nosotros had experienced at the time, or perhaps since. She eventually tore the horse apart and reformed it into bones, arms, human heads and mask-like faces that had the feeling of ominous emotional signifiers. All art is biographical to some degree, but in those days, Rothenberg's was mysteriously just brazenly and so. In the belatedly '70s, with the horses in the rear-view mirror, and in the midst of a divorce, Rothenberg produced a series of stark heads outlined in paint: a gusher of black liquid spews from the mouth of ane; a black stick-like class clogs the rima oris and pharynx of another and fingers poke the eye socket and mouth of a third. She told me that her head was filled with 'this messy crap of guilt and anger', and that she had to get rid of it. In 1981, a series of massive heads covered by easily provoked Peter Schjeldahl to describe them equally 'from the very backbrain depths' moving towards a 'shivery strength – the hint of a diabolical sense of humor, a strange, common cold joy'.

Forth with the dark side, there was indeed humour, joy and energetic enthusiasm in Rothenberg's paintings. When in the '80s she switched from using acrylics to oil paint a new exhilaration emerged in her brushstrokes, equally if mirroring the ordinarily forceful, tornado-similar and exuberant temperament of the creative person. And, of course, in the tardily '80s and '90s, in that location were the excited and colourful forms that came out of her move from New York to Galisteo, New Mexico, to live with her new hubby, Bruce Nauman. The loftier desert landscape inspired more color, new emotions, as well as literal action. Rothenberg and Nauman lived lonely on a big department of land. Animals were everywhere effectually the ranch: dogs, goats, snakes, some sheep, cattle, and aye, horses. Susan loved them all and seemed to exist in constant advice with them. I dare anyone to find a photograph of her without an animal in it.

Pink Raven (2012), Susan Rothenberg. Hall Art Foundation.

Pink Raven (2012), Susan Rothenberg. Hall Art Foundation. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York; © 2020 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Animals once more became emotional surrogates, jumping, flying, bucking and sometimes simply watching. 'When I'yard in the studio, I'm solitary except for the animals,' she told me. 'I wait at the canvas tacked to the wall and feel like I'm watching my listen. And the dogs look at me wondering what I'm looking at. And so I look at them and they finish up existence a part of the painting.'

Her last gallery shows were moody, including some large, menacing-looking black birds perched on limbs or just standing sentinel, guarding some deeper knowledge. One of Rothenberg's last paintings was large and dramatic, depicting a wild woman, hair flying, easily pounding a piano. Information technology is a very foreign painting that is excited and night, as if we are beingness a given a glimpse of pure mental and physical emotion. Information technology is the piece of work of an creative person who was resolute and fearless in her expressionism. Information technology's work we will sadly miss.

Michael Auping has curated several solo exhibitions of Susan Rothenberg's work, including her first museum exhibition in 1979 at the University Fine art Museum, Berkeley, and a touring retrospective which originated at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1992.