Dorthea Rockburne - Uriel
American, born in Canada, b.1934
Uriel, 1983
Lithograph printed on Transpagra, folded and mounted on ragboard, 40 x 32 inches
Edition 31/34
Gemini G.E.L.
00.016

Gift of Thomas S. Porter (MBA '67)

Dorothea Rockburne is associated with the first generation of American minimalist and conceptual artists that dates to the 1960s. Working with abstract shapes, she explored and called attention to subtle variations of form and, often, to the creative processes that engendered them.

For Uriel, Rockburne took a single sheet of Transpagra, a soft plastic-like paper and had printed on it a series of colored triangular shapes and a thin blue line. She then variously folded it over and back along the printed blue line to create the final work. Knowing this, the viewer can mentally attempt to retrace the means by which the resulting forms came into being. The iconic shape with its kite, wing and star-like forms invokes the name that Rockburne bestowed upon it. Uriel, who appears in Milton's Paradise Lost as the regent of the Sun, was one of the ten Archangels, those supreme beings that rank in the celestial hierarchy of angels based upon interpretations of various Scriptural references. The name Uriel means "God is light."