Renowned Artist Raquel Rabinovich, Known for Exploring Submerged Worlds, Passes Away at 95
**Raquel Rabinovich: A Celebrated Abstract Artist Who Explored the “Dark Source” of Creativity**
On January 5, 2024, Raquel Rabinovich, a renowned artist known for her evocative monochromatic paintings, intricate works on paper, and site-specific sculptures, passed away at the age of 95 in her Rhinebeck, New York, home. Her death was confirmed by the Raquel Rabinovich Art Trust. Rabinovich, lauded for her lifelong pursuit of representing the hidden and the intangible, leaves behind an influential legacy within the art world. Her contributions — spanning decades and continents — consistently pushed boundaries to unveil what she called the “dark source,” an exploration of the veiled layers of existence.
### Early Life and Education: Shaping a Visionary Artist
Born in 1929 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a Russian and Roman Jewish family, Rabinovich grew up in Córdoba before embarking on her artistic training. She began her studies at the University of Córdoba under the tutelage of Italian painter Ernesto Farina between 1950 and 1952, later continuing her education with Héctor Basaldúa in Buenos Aires. Her artistic education carried her to Europe in the mid-1950s, where she studied art history at the Sorbonne and honed her craft with Cubist artist André Lhote in Paris.
During her European years, Rabinovich absorbed diverse influences, forming a foundation for her distinctive oeuvre. In 1956, she married José Luis Reissig, with whom she eventually raised a family of three children. Her early works bore the hallmarks of her diverse training, but it was in the 1960s and 70s, after returning to Argentina, that her conceptual exploration of the “dark source” began to come to light.
### The “Dark Source”: A Lifelong Artistic Inquiry
Rabinovich’s art delves deeply into what she described as the hidden aspects of the universe — those unseen forces that fuel creativity, wisdom, and knowledge. “I have been repeatedly drawn to spaces of silence and darkness in which my work can transcend its materiality,” Rabinovich said in a 2020 interview with *Frontera D*. This spiritual connection to the unseen guided her diverse body of work, from abstract paintings like those in her *Dimension Five* series (1969–1974) to her ethereal sculptures conceived later in her career.
Her *Dimension Five* paintings, for instance, appear luminous, as though lit from an elusive, otherworldly source. Though comprised of painstakingly layered materials — oil, pencil, and wax — these works evoke a sense of the ephemeral, as if attempting to capture a fading memory or a moment of awakening. Their meditative and enigmatic quality is a hallmark of Rabinovich’s artistry.
### Journey to the United States: Defining a Career Amid Political Upheaval
The political turbulence in Argentina, amplified by a military coup in 1966, prompted Rabinovich to immigrate to the United States with her family in 1967. They settled in Huntington, Long Island, where she became a member of the American Abstract Artists group, aligning herself with an esteemed circle of modernist innovators that included Josef Albers and Alice Trumbull Mason.
It was during her time in New York that Rabinovich had a dream that would redirect her artistic practice. She envisioned her paintings becoming transparent, free-floating sculptures. By the mid-1970s, she began turning this dream into reality with works like *Tabletop Glass Sculpture (Untitled 1)* (1974). In this piece, Rabinovich employed dark-gray glass panes in a way that invited the viewer to experience interplay between light, shadow, and transparency — a metaphor for the ever-present yet elusive “dark source.”
### Expanding Horizons: Sculptures and Site-Specific Work
Rabinovich’s sculptural works often mirrored her exploration of impermanence, ambiguity, and the interplay between revelation and obscurity. A critical turning point for Rabinovich came through her site-specific sculptures, inspired by her immersion in Vipassana meditation and travels throughout South and Southeast Asia. Unsurpassed examples of this phase include her installation *Point/Counterpoint* (1983) at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. This striking site-specific piece leveraged bronze-tempered glass and strategic angles to mirror and obscure the architecture around it, questioning the stability of perception itself.
One of Rabinovich’s most poignant undertakings was her *Emergences* series (2001–2012), stone sculptures installed along the banks of the Hudson River. These works engaged directly with the natural world — visible or hidden depending on the tide’s rise and fall — seamlessly merging with her artistic philosophy of unveiling the unseen. Her *River Library* series (2002–2025), composed of mud adhered to scrolls of Essindia paper, drew direct inspiration