125 Newbury will present Gottlieb/Rothko: The Surrealist Years, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by two of the central protagonists of Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Curated by Arne Glimcher, this sequel to Gottlieb/Rothko: The Realist Years–presented at 125 Newbury in 2025–brings together works from 1941 to 1951, a pivotal decade in which the two artists broke from Realist figuration and forged a new language of Surrealist abstraction. During this time, Rothko and Gottlieb maintained a remarkably close artistic and intellectual dialogue, together turning to the language of myth, notions of automatism, and the power of the unconscious to uncover new ways of picturing a world that had been radically reshaped by the vicissitudes of history.
The works in the exhibition center around 1942–1946, a time when the devastation of World War II and the Holoca