Clare Rojas

This volume--the first on the artist in many years--surveys the recent abstractions of the much-admired San Francisco painter Clare Rojas (born 1976). Known for her association with a generation of artists that became internationally prominent through the exhibition Beautiful Losers, Rojas in her earlier paintings drew from various Russian and Eastern European folkloric subjects. While the figures have been removed from this more recent body of work, it is not hard to see their enduring impact on Rojas’ art: with their lively angularity and bold chromaticism, these paintings are equally evocative of folk art and the formalist reductions of key modernist abstract artists such as Alexander Calder, Matisse, Malevich or Ellsworth Kelly. Accompanying these works is an essay by the curator and Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum, Jens Hoffmann, and a poem by David Whyte.

Women of all ages and colors in simple, patterned dresses fill Rojas's works, full of confidence and big smiles. And men with soft, slumped bodies are often depicted naked in simple, flowing lines. The compassion and humor in these reversals, along with the exuberance of Rojas's creative power in a barrage of media--among them vibrant gouache-on-panel painting, installation, film, printmaking, quilting and banjo--have brought her increasing attention. The New York Times's Roberta Smith wrote in a 2004 review that Rojas's work "brims with promise."Hope Springs Eternal, the artist's first book, is not just an in-depth selection of images but an object in itself, its soft cover embossed with a quilted motif. Rojas studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago, she is represented by Deitch Projects in New York and her work has appeared in the traveling show, Beautiful Losers, among others.