A distressed red ground, now considering the possibility of rust, now resisting brown, pulses quietly with the variegated possibilities of its beginnings barely visible under the surface. . . . Process is revealed, concealed, revealed again. Placeless, seeking a place, placeless—painting as existential dilemma. . . . a geometry of inconclusion made all the richer visually for its lack of resolution. The viewer and the viewed engage in a struggle to find order where none is possible. The depth of the struggle is the reward. . . . His paintings charted here gorgeously address the possibility of becoming. —Klaus Kertess
In 1962, Michael Goldberg returned to New York from California, acquiring Mark Rothko’s former studio, at 222 Bowery, where the ceilings were 25 feet high. There, with Rothko’s paint spatters still on the studio floor, Goldberg found inspiration to create a series of paintings in a new and vigorous style, executed on an ambitious scale. In lieu of an easel, Goldberg mounted stretched canvases to his painting wall onto permanentlyattached vertical wooden strips. He sized his canvases with a clear glue solution so the brown linen was still evident when he applied his first strokes. He laid down paint with housepainter’s brushes and wide putty knives to create muscular and reductive compositions, a departure from his “all-over” abstractions of the 1950s. These near- monochromatic works, reveal the artist in dialogue with Rothko and Barnett Newman especially, but also with the emerging color field painters. And, they set a precedent for Robert Motherwell’s Open series. The very physicality of these paintings attests to a search for “honesty” and “authenticity” in his work.
In 1960, Goldberg had his first solo exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery, in New York. And, in 1964, Bill Berkson wrote an article for Artnews, “Michael Goldberg Paints a Picture,” in which he described the works of this period: The declamations of scale and luminosity were followed by a successive paring down of means and change of tone in Goldberg’s expression. By 1960, the surfaces had become thicker and more of a piece, with a few primary gestures of white plowing into their dark crust. Their range of allusion is minimal. They are tragic rituals from the vantage point of a mournful chorus. . . . . In some paintings, the white stripes trail and jut across washes of brick red or dense green with rough, veined areas and mat silences. The definition is all in the placement and changes of textures. The lines become protagonists trying to take and hold positions against “the clay of these parts.” In other paintings, the lines are left out and all that remains is a monochromatic field activated by shiny and mat sections, sometimes triangles or squares, that seem to open up and then immediately close off deep vistas in the center. Goldberg called these his most “introverted” paintings.
Michael Goldberg: The Red Paintings 1962–1963 opens to the public on Thursday, May 6 and will remain on view through Friday, July 30. The opening reception will be held on May 6, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essay by Klaus Kertess (23 pages; 9 plates).
Perpetual Motion: Michael Goldberg will open at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach College of the Arts, on September 9, 2010 and will remain on view through December 12. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, with essays by David Anfam, Bill Berkson, and Elizabeth Hanson.
The author: From 1966 to 1975, Klaus Kertess co-founded and directed the Bykert Gallery, representing Chuck Close, Barry Le Va, Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Paul Sharits et al. Since 1975, he has published essays in Artforum, Parkett, Art in America, and numerous other publications, and monographs on Peter Hujar, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, and Jane Freilicher, as well as essays on the work of John Chamberlain, Albert Oehlen, and Matthew Ritchie. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including the 1995 Whitney Biennial, Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing for the Drawing Center in New York (1988), and more recently Meditations in an Emergency (2007), the inaugural exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. A selection of his essays will be published in the fall of 2010, and he received the Lawrence A. Fleischman award for scholarly excellence in the field of American art history from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in October 2009.
