Background
Born in England, Geoffrey Rogers grew up in Clapham in South London. When the Blitz began, his family moved to Burgess Hill, near Brighton. After his father was killed by a German bomb, he was sent to Hungerford and subsequently to the Royal Masonic School for Boys.
He studied at the Central School of Art and Design under the leadership of Morris Kestelman; among his teachers were Keith Vaughan, Roger Hilton, and Mervin Peak. He was first shown in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London and had his first solo show at the New Arts Center London.
Rogers joined the teaching faculty at the Central School of Art and Design and the Chelsea School of Art, and continued exhibiting in the UK. In 1976, he emigrated to the United States, first to Boston and, in 1980, to New York where he lives and works today. In addition to his own practice, Rogers has continued to teach and in recent years, work extensively in art therapy with older adults diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementia.
Artist Statement
"It was in my student days that I became interested in Cubism and began to think about painting instead of just making paintings. Cubism triggered my fascination with the idea of structure as an annotated reality, symbolic and referential, consisting of sign, and sign of signs, signs of representation rather than representation itself. Formally, Cubism as I read it reversed the intent of classical perspective by extending its space out to the viewer rather than drawing the viewer in via a composed point of view. From Cubism I have taken the idea of creating a pictorial space that is not illusionist, i.e. not behind or even within the picture plane, but rather existing in the relationship between viewer and painting.
The sense of the transcendental, which I first found expressed in Cubist painting, has its deepest roots for me in Judaism. My practice is supported by and linked to over two decades of connection to the life of Beth Simchat Torah, my synagogue in New York City. Connectedness, the relationships between things, are more important than the things themselves. The importance of faith simply in the meaningfulness of being, ultimately in love, teaching me above all to have compassion for the world despite its horrors. I have always been more interested in the importance of what is good or evil, in what is not tangible than what is."