Plain black

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.