Rodney Carswell (born 1946) is an American abstract artist. He first gained recognition for human-scaled, geometric paintings that feature exposed, projected support structures, creating interplay between sculptural presence and richly painted pictorial surfaces.[1][2] His recent paintings eschew the superstructures and evoke a greater sense of immediacy, playfulness, and narrative.[3] Critics often describe Carswell’s work as uncanny, elusive or quirky, for its tendency to negotiate “in-between” spaces and embrace contradictions such as order and instability, intention and accident, or back and front.[4][5][6] Employing irregularly shaped canvasses, thick supports, and openings or holes that reveal the stretcher construction and walls behind them, works like 3 (In 4)(1994) often occupy a place between painting and sculpture.[7][1][8] In a similar way, Carswell uses the modernistlanguages of Minimalism, Suprematism and Constructivism, yet eludes those categories with postmodern allusions to architecture, the body and spiritual iconography, and with his process-oriented, “hand-made” surfaces.[4][5][9] In his essay for Carswell’s mid-career retrospective at Chicago's Renaissance Society, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel suggested that his understated paintings worked their way into the one’s consciousness in a “supple, somewhat unsettling manner” that achieves a subtle, but lingering shift in perception.[4]
Carswell has been featured in additional solo exhibitions at the University of Oklahoma Museum of Art and Miami University Museum of Art, as well as in key surveys at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA).[10][1] His work has been widely covered in art magazines[11] such as Artforum,[12] Art in America,[13] ARTnews,[14] and the New Art Examiner,[15] and major publications including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.[16][17][18][19] He has been recognized with fellowships from the John S. Guggenheimand Louis Comfort Tiffany foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.[10] In addition to his art practice, Carswell has taught and lectured on art and opened and operated a successful restaurant in Chicago
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