Raquel Rabinovich (1929, Buenos Aires, Argentina – 2025, Rhinebeck, New York) was a New York–based Argentinian-American artist. She was known for monochromatic paintings and drawings, large-scale glass sculptural environments, and site-specific stone installations along the Hudson River.

Throughout her career, Rabinovich worked across drawing, collage, painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice was driven by a sustained fascination with the ineffable nature of existence. Her work sought to reveal concealed dimensions underlying appearances, thoughts, language, and the material world. Central to her practice was what she termed the “dark source”: an attempt to make the invisible visible. This enduring inquiry shaped her oeuvre for over sixty years.

Born to a Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrant family, Rabinovich was raised in Córdoba, Argentina. In the mid-to-late 1950s, she lived in Europe before settling in the United States in 1967, where she lived and worked until her death in 2025.

Travel played a formative role in her work. Journeys to India, Nepal, Indonesia, Egypt, Peru, and the Hudson Valley deeply influenced her artistic language. She was drawn to spaces of silence and darkness, and to ancient, rooted traditions. These concerns led her to explore the ground as a site of spiritual inquiry, using mud, stone, and glass as metaphors for time, impermanence, and transformation.

Her work was also shaped by a deep engagement with poetry and Latin American literature. She connected her practice to non-literal and magical modes of thinking, and to the liminal spaces found in texts by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, and Luisa Valenzuela. These influences are evident in her ongoing series on paper, When Silence Becomes Poetry.

In the early 2000s, Rabinovich set aside paint in favor of mud drawings and stone installations. When she returned to painting in 2014, drawing and painting once again became central to her practice.

Rabinovich was the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the 2011–2012 Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She was also awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2023–2024. Her archives were donated to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and she is included in its Oral History Program.

Extended bio

Over the course of a seventy-year-long career, New York-based Argentinian-American artist Raquel Rabinovich was concerned with the paradox of making the invisible visible. She integrated themes of mythology, existence, nature, and transcendence in her monochromatic paintings and drawings, as well as in her sculptural practice that encompassed large-scale glass environments and site-specific stone installations along the shores of the Hudson River. Through her exploration of a range of material choices and artistic processes, Rabinovich’s work conveyed “that which is concealed emerging into view.”[1]

Born in 1929 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrant family, Rabinovich was raised in nearby Córdoba. There she began taking painting and drawing classes with Italian artist Ernesto Farina. At this time she was also politically active and was briefly held as a political prisoner. She later studied medicine and studio art at the Universidad de Córdoba before moving to Buenos Aires, where she studied with painter Héctor Basaldúa. In the mid-1950s, she moved to Europe, where she lived in Paris, Edinburgh, and Copenhagen, and married her husband, José Luis Reissig, in 1956. In Paris, she attended classes at La Sorbonne and at the atelier of French Cubist painter André Lhote. Her studies and travels introduced her to the work of Modern European artists such as Georges Braque and Piet Mondrian, the Art Informel movement, and Old Masters—in particular Diego Velázquez—all of which drove her work into a more non-objective mode of painting, evolving from semi-figurative portraits and still lives to pure abstraction.

Upon her return to Buenos Aires in the early 1960s, Rabinovich began a series of near-monochromatic paintings titled The Dark is Light Enough. These textural works, realized in a spectrum of earthy hues, marked the beginning of a lifelong investigation into what Rabinovich called the “dark source.” For Rabinovich, the dark represented neither negativity nor absence but a rich realm of knowledge and wisdom. Each subsequent body of work, whether painting, drawing, collage, or sculpture, represented an embodiment of those “concealed aspects of existence which lie behind the appearance of things, thoughts, language, and the world.”[2] In her monochromatic paintings and drawings, layers accumulated and melded into variated fields of grey, black, and white, creating a muted shimmering effect that has been compared to the black cruciform paintings of Ad Reinhardt.[3]

As the political climate in Argentina became increasingly unstable, Rabinovich moved with Reissig and their three children to New York in 1967. They settled in Huntington, Long Island, where Rabinovich became immersed in the contemporary art scene. She joined the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and was introduced to the work of Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt. She was particularly inspired by the subtle gridded canvases of Agnes Martin, whose practice of simply “sitting and looking” as an essential part of her artistic process resonated deeply with Rabinovich.[4] From the late-1960s to the mid-1970s, her earlier lyrical gestures gave way to more refined, near-geometric abstractions—most notably in her series of paintings titled Dimension Five.

Following her divorce from Reissig in 1979, Rabinovich moved to Manhattan, where her loft became a meeting place for fellow artists. There she continued to pursue a series of sculptures made from plates of tinted grey and bronze glass, a project she had begun in the early 1970s with the help of the nonprofit organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Rabinovich worked with fabricators of tempered glass and produced a series of sculptures that ranged from tabletop maquettes to large-scale environments. Rabinovich saw these sculptures as a spatial extension of her paintings, allowing her to work with transparency in three dimensions and to create spaces that were “simultaneously accessible and inaccessible, open and enclosed, tangible and intangible, private and public, visible and invisible”—a set of paradoxical conditions that were present throughout her various bodies of work.[5] The layering of the tinted panels of glass created a play of “reality and illusion” and invited the viewers to see “from nothing to everything and from everything to nothing.”[6] By revealing the mechanics of human vision and perception, these glass environments evoked the work of Light and Space artists like Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell who, like Rabinovich, worked primarily with “the medium of [one’s] own awareness.”[7] For Rabinovich, glass presented a medium that allowed her to play with states of translucency and opacity, as its “physicality would dematerialize to become just transparency.” Although these works evoked the visual language of Minimalism, for Rabinovich they were metaphors, referencing metaphysical, symbolic, architectural, and mathematical worlds.

This impulse to ground the viewer in perceptual observation could be traced to her own spiritual practice of Vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation. With its connotations of perception, contemplation, and insight, Vipassana was an apt extension of her artistic pursuit to create a “visual silence” in her work.[8] In the late 1980s, around the time that she began practicing Vipassana, Rabinovich reunited with Reissig and traveled throughout South and Southeast Asia; her experiences of the regions’ various cultures and sacred architecture went on to have a significant impact on her work, including series such as Chhodrtens (1989–1990), Garbhagrihas (1991–1993), and Thrones for the Gods (Suites A and B, 1992–1995). Given her longstanding interest in “spaces of silence and darkness”—including the ruins at Machu Picchu, the caves at Lascaux, and even the Catholic churches of Córdoba that she sought out for their quietude in her youth—it was not surprising that the temples and monuments she encountered in places like Nepal and India inspired her to work increasingly in site-specific, architectural modes.[9]

By the early 1990s, Rabinovich had moved from Manhattan to upstate New York, where she created her first stone installations on her property in Rhinebeck. Titled Pabhavikas (1995–2000), a Pali word meaning “emerging from,” these stone mounds referenced both ancient temples that seemed to Rabinovich to be born from the earth itself, as well as the metaphorical process of something concealed coming to the surface, revealing itself. To create these works, Rabinovich purchased truckloads of stones from local quarries and positioned them around existing rocks in the forest, gradually building up piles of stone that resembled the remnants of aging ruins. In 2001, she transferred this practice from the woods to the shores of the Hudson River. Titled Emergences (2001–2012), these site-specific stone installations were daily concealed and revealed by the cyclical rising and falling of the river tides, enhancing their themes of impermanence and flux. While many Emergences still existed, others had succumbed to the fluctuations of currents and time, an effect Rabinovich embraced; in this way, her stone installations differentiated themselves from the monumental gestures of some iconic Land artists, deriving instead from a quieter impulse akin to the ephemeral practices of Andy Goldsworthy or Richard Long.

Rabinovich’s deep-rooted love of poetry and literature was always central to her practice. She was especially drawn to the magical worlds in Latin American literature present in the work of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Luisa Valenzuela. Rabinovich noted that “beyond the language of the novel or the poem or the story, there is always an element that is beyond the words, in between the lines, which is not literal….I resonate with that world.”[10] Many of Rabinovich’s series of paintings and works on paper could be seen as odes to the intangible, liminal space between language and silence. In Gateless Gates (1995–1997), Light Unworn (1998–2000), and Thresholds (2014–2017), for instance, the artist concealed words and statements within the painting; in order to discern these embedded passages, viewers had to slowly linger with the work over a period of time, visually excavating them from beneath layers of oil paint and wax.

Rabinovich’s interests in rivers and language merged in the series River Library (2002–present). To create these works, she submerged handmade paper into mud from rivers as near as the Hudson and as far-flung as the Ganges and the Paraná. When dry, she sometimes arranged them into diptychs resembling open codices, or rolled them into the scroll-like forms. She made hundreds of these “drawings” to date, each with a color and quality unique to its source. For Rabinovich, rivers, like stones, were “repositories of history,” containing information about a region’s geology as well as the past and present civilizations that had congregated along their shores.[11] As such, the River Library works functioned like visual documents that recorded both natural and cultural history, where mud became “the alphabet of a language yet to be deciphered.”[12]

Most recently, Rabinovich completed a series of works on paper titled Magic Squares (2018–2020). Each work featured the subtle outlines of the magic square’s gridded form, a mathematical problem in which a set of numbers placed in each of the grid’s rows and columns added up to the same sum. According to Rabinovich, “magic squares are ancient symbols of mythical significance and esoteric spirituality. They imply the combination of numbers that were believed to be the source of the essentials of wisdom. In this series of drawings I don’t inscribe the numbers, which are present in their absence.”[13]

Rabinovich’s work was featured in national and international exhibitions, including at the Americas Society; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; Fundación Alón para las Artes; the Jewish Museum; P.S. 1; and El Museo del Barrio. Recent solo exhibitions included Raquel Rabinovich: The Reading Room (2018) at Vassar College, Thresholds at the Y Gallery (2017), and Raquel Rabinovich: Excerpts (2017) at the Pratt Institute Libraries. Her work was held in private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received numerous grants and fellowships, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the 2011–12 Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2023–2024. Her archives were donated to the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and she was included in its Oral History Program.