Warren Rohrer (1927-1995)

Warren Rohrer was born in Lancaster County, PA and became one of Philadelphia’s leading abstract painters in the late 20th century. Coming from a Lancaster Mennonite upbringing, he strayed from conventional professional paths of becoming a farmer or minister when he began to pursue art and art education. Rohrer quickly embedded himself in the national contemporary art scene and would go on to teach for 25 years at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts).

Through the 1960s and 70s, Rohrer worked out of a converted barn in Christiana, PA, using the landscape of his youth as his primary subject, before beginning to approach total abstraction in his work. These abstractions were rooted in a deep sense of place, with a unique connection between the agricultural fields around him and his exploration of modernist painting and color fields. Many 1970s works are notable for their study of the organization of space through regular and irregular grids and repetitive mark-making. After 1980, these works would transition into densely layered and luminous explorations of color.

In 1984, Rohrer moved his studio to the former workspace of acclaimed muralist Violet Oakley in Chestnut Hill. While teaching in Philadelphia and exhibiting extensively, the artist continued to visit Lancaster on a weekly basis to photograph and make studies. Of particular interest was a field at the source of the Conestoga River - a place where nine generations of his Mennonite forebears had originally settled. His subsequent oeuvre explored a language of forms found in this landscape, with a deeply personal and gestural script embedded within.

The subject of a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003, Rohrer's work is now in many museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art and the Delaware Art Museum.

Source: Locks Gallery, Philadelphia