Rebecca Raubacher

Painting With Mylar 1983-2026

In 1983, I placed a sheet of mylar onto a wet painting, then added marks and paint to the Mylar, immediately heightening the drama adding a third dimension to the painting. This exhibition, 
"Painting With Mylar, 1983-2026" features decades of experimenting with this process.
Thank you to Patt Panzer and Carson Zullingerof the Lumen Gallery for giving me the opportunity
to exhibit this body of work. I would also like to thank the Dupont Corporation for 
providing me with the Mylar.

Rebecca Raubacher

Rebecca Raubacher is well known for her skill at constructing emotive figures on a large scale. Her 
impressive compositions convey the fullness of the human figure, the shape and weight of the body. Those bodies are simultaneously suspended and grounded in liminal spaces, 
existing in transition.They are of time and outside of time, and the result is a sense of universality.

Her use of Mylar in the 1980s introduced another element, one of physical dimensionality. Paired with her signature cropping, the additional layer intensifies the entire configuration. Watercolor, charcoal, oil stick, acrylic, torn black paper, and Mylar are combined with energetic effects her earlier works illustrate the influence of Raubacher’s time spent sketching in the dance studio. Dancers are captured in motion, twisting and turning, sweating and pausing. There is a visceral thrill to viewing the work.

Raubacher’s “kinetic marks,” as she describes them, recording the intensity of the actions as brushstrokes on the body. Raubacher’s recent Mylar work provides a counterpoint in 
energy and mood. While calmer, the figures are no less self-possessed. They recline, basking in the afterglow of endorphins. They are godlike in their ambiguity, existing beyond age, gender, and time. Suspended between places and moments, they are like Greek gods onto whom we can 
project our memories or desires.

Margaret Winslow
Head Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art
Delaware Art Museum