“A painting should be something that begins and ends in itself,” Rothfuss wrote. With this cutout frame, the artist put his principle into practice: the yellow rectangle on the left juts out, and the support takes on the shape of the painting itself. While his work was indebted to that of Joaquín Torres-García and to European abstract artists such as Mondrian, Rothfuss was also influenced by vernacular practices. The alkyd resin present in this work was also used by the artist to create floats for carnival parades in his native Montevideo.
Gallery label from Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift, October 21, 2019–March 14, 2020