ROSEMARIE CASTORO

Finding early inspiration in experimental dance and choreography while a student at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and in subsequent collaborations with Minimal dancer Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s, Castoro’s work throughout her life exhibited a distinctly performative character and understanding of space and movement. From 1964 onwards, Castoro created systematic works exploring colour and structural compositions in highly innovative experimentations, like her Y-Unit Interference and Inventory paintings and drawings. In 1968–a time of political unrest in the USA–Castoro abandoned colour and started to engage with Concept Art, Street Works, Concrete Poetry and Post-Minimal sculpture. From the 1970s until the last years of her life, Castoro focused on sculptural experimentation. She introduced surreal and sexual allusions into the rational and mathematical frame of Minimalism, her work’s organic shapes presenting a parallel to the experimentation of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.

Throughout her life she showed a tendency to blend media–declaring herself a ‘paintersculptor’. Neither wholly Minimalist nor feminist, her work transgressed and metamorphosed into an erotically charged language. The feminist critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard later identified her as a figure who ‘subverted or overrode Minimalism on its own turf’.