Steve Roden, a multidisciplinary artist who produced abstract work in painting, sculpture, sound, installation and video, died at home in Pasadena on Wednesday.
Steve Roden, a multidisciplinary artist whose abstract work in painting, sculpture, sound, installation and video fused delicate nuance with vivacious invention, died at home in Pasadena on Wednesday. He was 59. Roden had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2017.
Roden’s final solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles, the gallery where he showed regularly for nearly 20 years, was mounted in the summer of 2019. During the subsequent pandemic, he continued to work privately in his studio. Earlier examples of his distinctive aesthetic were featured in recent group exhibitions in California and Europe, including “Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020,” a major survey of contemporary sound art at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Roden’s work is scheduled for inclusion in next year’s “Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific” at Chapman University, part of the Getty Foundation’s upcoming Pacific Standard Time initiative exploring intersections between art and science. He was the subject of a 2010 midcareer retrospective at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece.
The Vielmetter exhibition cross-referenced elaborate paintings with a pair of projected videos and a sound installation, its sonic form made by blowing into the disassembled wooden reed boxes of a vintage pipe organ. The videos featured the artist manipulating bits of collage into place, although everything is provisional, nothing permanently fixed. Titled “detritus” (debris) and “orrery” (a mechanical model of the solar system), all written in lower-case letters, the modest visual narratives have no beginning and no end. The shifting forms, however, were reflected in paintings constructed from crystalline shapes assembled from brightly colored, improvisational marks, almost in the manner of song.
