Like the Spice is pleased to present Dean Goelz: Beaded Curtain, an exhibition of the artist’s astoundingly magical works on paper and panel. Composed of fractal accretions of meticulously placed shiny white dots and tightly rendered faces and hands, the figures in Goelz’s works seem to manifest themselves face first from nothingness. Not quite delimited, more atmospheric than solid, these apparitions are between two worlds, present yet translucent.

Despite their delicate limbo, each figure is endowed with a strikingly detailed specificity. You can read the history of the characters between the fine lines of their faces and see the individual particularities of their dance-like gestures. These figures are very much a product of time. They exist in nothingness but came from a more solid world. This focus, however, does not mark the works as portraits; they are actually more archetypical and emotional than they are illustrative. Each character seems at once to be an individual and an everyman or everywoman.

Alone amid the void of unmarked backgrounds, each figure is left to struggle with their place. Orienting in nothingness leaves no choice but to look inward, living an ascetic silence. This stillness is reflected in the artist’s meditative approach to his gruelingly controlled and repetitive process. The time taken to complete each work requires a patience and love like that of a longtime relationship, committed, complex and mundanely miraculous. The web-like networks of dots, slowly unfurling over time, mark the hours of a life lived in art.

Dean Goelz graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. His work has shown nationally and internationally and is included in private collections in the US, France, and the Czech Republic. He lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This will be Dean Goelz’s second solo show at Like the Spice.