Rothko Chapel
Rothko Chapel is a temple to death, the great obliterator-transformer. Death rambling, in wounded dialectic with life: Nietzsche’s nihil, Adorno’s negation. Produced during Rothko’s late “dark” period, the fourteen large canvases contained in the chapel surround the viewer like the arresting monoliths of Stonehenge. Three triptych arrangements adorn the dominant square walls, four single paintings occupy the canted corners of the square-cross building, and a final field painting unifies the panorama. Despite no perfect symbolic syzygies, the groups of fours and threes feel mystically loaded, like the four cardinal directions, the Holy Trinity, or the four seasons of three months.
Exclusive to the Magazine
Rothko Chapel by Grant Edward is featured in full in Issue 3 of Memo magazine.
Get your hands on the print edition through our online shop or save up to 20% and get free domestic shipping with a subscription.
Related
The APY Art Centre Collective scandal, ignited by Murdoch’s The Australian, exposed more than allegations of interference—it revealed power struggles in the Aboriginal art industry and became a flashpoint for culture wars. As institutions, dealers, and politicians jockeyed for position, the artists were caught in a battle over authenticity, control, and the future of Aboriginal contemporary art.
KIRAC’s gonzo filmmaking shatters art world niceties, but their entanglement with Michel Houellebecq—novelist, provocateur, reluctant porn star—turns chaotic. As lawsuits fly and reputations fray, the real spectacle isn’t the film itself but the battle over who gets to tell the story.
Before pop, before Warhol, before Hamilton—there was Donald Duck. In a wartime outpost in Papua, Charles Bush painted an eerily prescient vision of mass media’s encroachment. A symptom, not an agent, of pop’s first age, Bush’s work sits uneasily in art history’s timeline.
