Curated by : Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna
promoted and organised by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, in collaboration with the Ministero della Cultura: Direzione regionale Musei nazionali Toscana – Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Public Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze.
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Private Supporters: Fondazione CR Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi.
Main Partner: Intesa Sanpaolo
With the support of Kenneth C. Griffin and Griffin Catalyst, Maria Manetti Shrem, Gruppo Beyfin S.p.A., Aon, Arteria.
promoted and organised by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, in collaboration with the Ministero della Cultura: Direzione regionale Musei nazionali Toscana – Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Public Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze.
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Private Supporters: Fondazione CR Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi.
Main Partner: Intesa Sanpaolo
With the support of Kenneth C. Griffin and Griffin Catalyst, Maria Manetti Shrem, Gruppo Beyfin S.p.A., Aon, Arteria.

"Rothko in Florence "

Mark Rothko

Palazzo Strozzi

piazza degli Strozzi, FIRENZE (FI)ITALY
T. +39 055 2645155 email : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

14 March > 23 August 2026

---

About the artist

---

Mark Rothko (Markus Rothkowitz) was born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903. At the age of ten, he emigrated with his mother and sister to the United States, joining his father and brothers in Portland. From 1921 to 1923 he attended Yale University before moving to New York. In 1929 he began teaching at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a position he held for the next twenty years. In 1935 he founded the group The Ten, exhibiting with them until 1940. Between 1936 and 1937 he worked for the Easel Division of the W.P.A. Federal Art Project, painting works for government buildings. In 1940 he co-founded the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
His paintings and watercolours from the late 1930s to 1946 reveal his interest in Greek mythology, primitive art, and psychoanalysis. Influenced by the Surrealists, Rothko experimented with automatic drawing, creating abstract forms alluding to human and animal life. In 1945, Surrealist-inspired works were shown in his solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York. He also exhibited several times at the annual exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Towards the end of the 1940s, Rothko’s work underwent a decisive shift: he abandoned figuration, including its Surrealist variations, to concentrate on abstract compositions that became his distinctive hallmark. His large-scale canvases were built from floating, layered expanses of colour. In 1954 he held a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 1958 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. That same year he accepted the celebrated commission for a cycle of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. Later, Rothko withdrew from the commissioon and these works were donated to Tate in London, with the agreement that they be displayed together in a dedicated room. Further exhibitions followed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1962 and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963.
From 1964 to 1967 Rothko worked on a major cycle commissioned by collectors and patrons Dominique and John de Menil for a Catholic chapel designed by Philip Johnson in Houston. Now an interfaith space. In 1969 the Mark Rothko Foundation was established to provide assistance to artists in need. Mark Rothko committed suicide in his New York studio in 1970.

---