Blaise Rosenthal is a self-taught artist born in New York City in 1973. At the age of six, his family relocated to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where he would spend the remainder of his formative years in an isolated region of Northern California. He cites the solitude of this period, and his immersion in the local wildlands as the basis for the environmental archetypes that have informed his abstract vocabulary. Currently residing and working in Truckee, California, Rosenthal uses the experience of years of extensive travels as a means of developing a broader context within which to place his work. In his practice, the artist prefers simple materials such as charcoal, pastel, acrylic paint and paper or canvas, and focuses on the dynamic nature of abstraction to create paintings that often reference landscape while offering both a subjective sincerity and an objective accessibility. In this way, he endeavors to dismantle the loneliness of his youth by creating connection through work that transcends identity-oriented barriers and touches on fundamental aspects of our common human experience. Rosenthal was named the New American Paintings Reader's Choice Artist and the New American Paintings Juror's Selection Noteworthy Artist for the Pacific Coast. Recent exhibitions include Plateau, Hugomento, San Francisco, CA (2022); High Plains, Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA (2022); and Nomadic Structure, Saarlandischen Kunstlerhaus, Saarbruken, Germany (2022). He is represented by Municipal Bonds.
"I find the transcendent subtlety and quietude of Blaise Rosenthal's intricate compositions in charcoal and acrylic on canvas immediately captivating. His softly wavering, almost flickering, striations evoke the ascetic quality of Agnes Martin's grid paintings of the 1960s and '70s, while his manner of binding canvases together to form multipartite compositions signals a contemporary understanding of how to push the medium in new directions. Although this artist is self-taught, his formal excellence, evident commitment to process, and sophisticated understanding of his medium set these abstractions apart. Despite the apparent simplicity of his work's construction, these paintings are redolent with nuance and complexity."
—Apsara Diquinzio, Juror, New American Paintings