NEW YORK, NY.- FreedmanArt presents "Of Leaves and Clouds," an invitational exhibition featuring paintings, works on paper, and collages by the New York artist Glenn Goldberg, opening Saturday, March 5, 2016.
The subject, "Of Leaves and Clouds," will include themes present throughout decades of Goldberg’s work. This exhibition focuses on Goldberg's intimate relationship to a vast world of natural forms. Rather than literal representations of nature (leaves, clouds), these elements reshape themselves and invite sustained looking.
The recent paintings bear Goldberg's language of recognizable "dots" and transparent washes of color and grisaille. At once tactile and ephemeral, the "dots" articulate spaces that are both shallow and deep, alive, and unnervingly still. In a recent review, Roberta Smith said of Goldberg's paintings: “He builds his images from infinitesimal dots that give the works an ambiguous, almost celestial ethereality and infuse his surfaces with an air of devotional quiet.” In this way, the marks not only construct pictorial space, but are a record of concentrated attention, time, and devotion.
The earlier collages, created during an extended visit in Prato, Italy in 1989, utilize line and opacity in an intuitive and deliberate way. They are graphic in nature, though the hand is always felt. As in the recent works, they rely on layering (Goldberg has referenced making pictures "back to front"), and include ideas of the monumental, air, and privacy, within and across individual works.
In a statement for an exhibition at the Albany Museum of Art in 1989, then curator Peter Doroshenko wrote: “[The paintings blend] in a loose philosophical way various western iconography, dream sources, and Freudian imagery. Glenn Goldberg’s paintings contain many groupings, codes or "pools" of reference, molded intuitively from a multiplicity of sensibilities. In taking them out of their usual context and placing them in an environment that is unnatural, the works become both fictional and dramatic. Goldberg's art flows from an immeasurable vacillation between the grand and the intimate… He does not make epic pictures to be worshipped, though each breathes deeply of the sublime."
Glenn Goldberg (born in 1953, Bronx, New York) lives and works in New York. Selected gallery exhibitions include Willard Gallery, New York, NY; Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA; Knoedler & Co, New York, NY; Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, NY; Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, MO; Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, NY (including his most recent exhibition, “All Day,” in cooperation with Jason McCoy Gallery, February 28 - April 24, 2015); and Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI. Noted public collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.
