Costa Rica-born Rosita Gottlieb painted professionally for more than a half-century and mastered the art of painting with the spatula, the artist's knife.
Her first exhibition was in 1963 at the National Art Institute in Panama City. Over the years she exhibited in galleries worldwide, including Mexico City, Tel Aviv, London, San Francisco, Taipei, Hong Kong, the Los Angeles area, and San Jose, Costa Rica. Her last exhibit was in 2015 at the Thousand Oaks (California) Civic Arts Plaza. She passed away in 2016 at age 85.
Rosita painted with passion and energy, and said that “I painted my truth, as I saw and experienced life.” She always enjoyed her craft immensely, as the photo above, taken in 1993, clearly shows.
During her long career, Rosita gained a reputation as a bold colorist. Her primary medium was oil, to which she added marble sand, beeswax, wire mesh, and other materials, to create thickly textured paintings. She also added faces and figures in the background of her paintings, a second layer of surprising elements behind the primary subject of her canvases. In a 1971 article on her work, she was quoted as saying: “I’m very pleased when people who have bought my paintings tell me they keep finding new things in the canvases, three, four years later.” Or even decades later!
"Her jammy colors bubble and eddy across extraordinary canvases," wrote James Heard, of the London Arts Review, during a London exhibition in 1973. Aubrey Simpson, editor of the United Airline’s inflight magazine Hemispheres, wrote this about her work for a January 1994 cover article: "Her expressionistic paintings are a visual diary of her relentless spiritual search. She uses the knife to create a rich, hypnotic, multidimensional effect."
