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FOCUS: Boxes and Paintings
April 5 - May 12, 2012
LABYRINTH, 2012
Encaustic on linen over wood panel
36 x 30 inches
$11,000
MOTH, 2011
Wood, stainless steel wire, coke cinders, gesso and oil
19.25 x 17.5 x 5.5 inches
$9,000
SKY AND SHORE, 2012
Wood, stainless steel wire, coke cinders, gesso and oil
12.5 x 10 x 3.5 inches
$6,000
ADRIFT, 2012
Wood, stainless steel wire, coke cinders, gesso and oil
17.5 x 16 x 3.5 inches
$7,000
SHADOW DANCE, 2012
Wood, stainless steel wire, coke cinders, gesso and oil
19.5 x 17.5 x 3.5 inches
$8,000
CLUSTER, 2011
Wood, stainless steel wire, coke cinders, gesso and oil
17.5 x 19.25 x 5.5 inches
$9,000
BLUE ARRAY, 2011
Encaustic on linen over wood panel
36 x 36 inches
$11,000
FACET, 2007
Encaustic on linen over wood panel
24 x 30 inches
$8,000.
Born in 1947 in Seattle, Goldberg was raised near Spokane in Eastern
Washington. He was educated at the University of Washington until he
dropped out in 1968. His first few exhibitions in the late 1960s,
with Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle, revealed two separate
inquiries into abstraction. He was producing small landscape
drawings and paintings that were somewhat surrealistic in nature
while, at the same time, beginning a course of abstraction that
would define his early career. In these first abstractions on paper,
small shapes floated within larger planes of color, the central
shape often echoing the shapes the larger field. They were mindful
of both the Russian Suprematist work of Kasimir Malevich and the
work of post-war abstract artists such as Albers, Rothko and Held.
This paring down of essentials had, by the 1970s, become a direction
followed by various artists across the United States - one thinks of
Robert Irwin or John McCracken as easily as Brice Marden or Kenneth
By 1975, these works on paper would develop into larger works in oil
or wax over linen stretched over wood panels. The central floating
images became striated and sometimes even gestural. A series of tall
vertical paintings in the late 1970s and early 1980s suggested
classical columns or stacks of rectangles within the larger
rectangle.
In the early 1980s, Goldberg had perfected the technique of
encaustic painting for which he would become most well known. By
mixing brilliantly hued raw pigments with translucent beeswax,
Goldberg is working with a tradition of painting with wax that
connects him with some of the earliest paintings known to man.
Goldberg builds his painted surface with layer after layer of color
until a palpable luminescence is achieved. The surface is flamed and
buffed developing a waxy, lustrous sheen.
In the late 1990s, Goldberg exhibited a group of landscapes depicting the familiar forms such as gorges, ridges, fields as well as Soap Lake in Eastern Washington, where the artist had been living since 1984. These land, sky and waterscapes revealed that this appreciation of the natural world have been the most enduring images in Goldberg's work. In his current paintings, Goldberg adds elements of weather and observations of the sky to these abstracted landscapes--lightning, to be more specific, is a recurring theme in a number of works.
The
artist in his Eastern Washington State studio
Other works in the exhibition parallel Goldberg's earlier interests in Minimalist painting. Several pieces investigate a severely reduced composition-a field of rich, nuanced white is edged with small bands and rectangles of high key color intruding slightly into it. These are mindful of the late Mondrian works and also of Motherwell's ongoing Open Series in which he would create a painted space suggestive of the openness of doors or windows without being representational. Similarly, much of Goldberg's past and present work seems related to architecture. Suggestions of archeological relics, mosaic panels, floor plans, doors, tunnels, arches, windows and columns, have figured in nearly every body of work. Other paintings in this exhibition are overtly representational with figurative elements in the forms of silhouettes and skeletons, as well as a haunting painting of an owl.
The Northwest has so little history with reductive art that Goldberg
seems a refreshing comment on a minimalist aesthetic with these
newest works.
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