Glenn Goldberg

A unique, idiosyncratic figure among the landscape of contemporary painting, 70-year-old, Bronx-native Glenn Goldberg’s work is delightfully difficult to categorize, and for this reason alone, stands out and refreshes the discussion around the world's oldest medium. “There are no birds in my work,” says Goldberg of his most recent body of paintings, whose primary motif just happens to be the silhouette of a bird. Never mind that the avian cutout essentially functions as a structural device, the beauty and felicitous, koan-like logic of this statement starts to make perfect sense when you consider everything else that’s going on in his paintings. Meticulously crafted via a systematic mark-making method which resembles stitching on top of demarcated fields of vibrant color, the paintings are liable to bring to mind everything from Persian rugs to Tibetan mandalas to aboriginal picture making to the flat, spaceless graphics of early video games. Their compositions and colors seem to be galvanized by a crystalline, pictorial logic that appeals directly to an intuitive understanding that exists right on the threshold of language. Any attempt to explain them, like a dream, all but makes them flutter and flee; quietly observed and admired, they glow and shimmer like incontrovertible facts which casually defy the laws of gravity.

Glenn Goldberg has exhibited at the Planthouse, New York; Betty Cunnihngham Gallery, New York; M. David & Co., Brooklyn; and more. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Rose Art Museum Waltham, MA; the National Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; and West Virginia University Art Collection, among others.