Glenn Goldberg

The dream-like iconography of Goldberg’s paintings captures the spirit of 1970s America, a time when fantasy and invention assumed a social significance and spiritual intention. Each work, recurringly titled “An Other Place”, draws from the artist’s invention and structural inclination, referring to a place that is unknown and, as Goldberg states, “more there than here”. The artist’s familiar motifs appear to reference the natural world, yet reject specificity. Instead, they appear as indexical signs, as if they are stand-ins for us. By employing borders, stacked forms, decorative passages and architectural elements, Goldberg’s paintings are built landscapes that shimmer and reward prolonged looking. It is an effect that owes much to the artist’s mark-making which indexes sewing, weaving, printing and ideas related to craft and the decorative arts. Stitched atop washes of vibrant colour, Goldberg’s strokes record physical labour, delineate pictorial space and make a case for intimate repetition. Beyond tone, space and form, these accumulated marks reveal anxiety, perseverance and a calmness out of which artistic decisions are formed. Glenn Goldberg (b. 1953, New York, USA) lives and works in New York, USA