Terrence Rogers wasn’t just an art dealer, he was an art lover. Walking through a gallery with him was inevitably electrifying because his excitement and passion were palpable.
In 1980, he began work at the Tatischeff Gallery in New York. In 1987, he came to Santa Monica and opened the Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery on Broadway. Ten years later, he suffered kidney failure, and was forced to close the gallery.
His health restored, he opened a new gallery, Terrence Rogers Fine Art, on Fifth Street in 1999, and continued to work, write and advise clients until shortly before he died at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center on Friday, June 17, from complications following a stroke. He was 52.
Unmoved by trends or fashions, Rogers was an iconoclast who cut his own path through the tangle of contemporary art, and championed observation-based painting and drawing rooted in American aesthetic traditions that date back to the Hudson River School,
The technical gifts of the artists he represented ranged from intense, precisely controlled renderings to spontaneous, immediate plein-air painting, and the profound clarity of Rogers’ sensibility won his gallery a unique place in the Los Angeles art scene.
Rogers was a founding member of the Santa Monica-– Venice Art Dealers Association, and was instrumental in launching the first Los Angeles International.A native of northern California, Rogers studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and School of Visual Art in New York City. He is survived by his devoted partner of 28-years, Terry Martin, and his mother, Naomi Rogers, both of Santa Monica, his sisters Shirley Walker and Judy Jacoboni and his brothers Richard and Ron, A memorial service will be held Saturday, June 25, at 2:30 p.m., at the Agape International Spiritual Center, 5700 Buckingham Parkway in Culver City. More details can be found at the gallery’s website: www.TROGART.com.
