Phyllis Goldberg: Curated by Jack Pierson,

“Phyllis Goldberg’s work vibrates in a zone where intellect intersects with spirit….. she has consistently produced a fascinating series of works that speak to us of the endless possibilities of form, beauty and change.”

Jack Pierson

Featuring flat shapes that ambiguously reference both natural and constructed forms, Goldberg’s abstract paintings from the late 1990’s serve as the point of departure for this, her first solo exhibition in New York. Wanting to monumentalize form into something which alluded to rather than depicted nature, she began reconstructing earlier gestural paintings by simplifying and enlarging select imagery, eliminating extraneous detail and reducing modulated color to flat planes. Working in oil allowed her to achieve an ideal level of flatness when applying layer after layer of different shades of black. She also reformulated biomorphic shapes from her sculptures, experimented with repetition of form-all the while concentrating on the importance of edge in relation to the ground-in order to create paintings featuring mute, flat shapes hovering at the edge of stasis.

During the last ten years Goldberg has continued her experimentations with form through a variety of media and selections of her black and white and color print photography, sculpture, video and collage will be on view. Most recently, she has been digitally transposing quiet shapes culled from earlier paintings into pulsating and highly evocative, acrylic-over-digital-print compositions.

From the spare, unembellished forms of her earlier black-and-white abstractions to her most recent forays into the sublime, Goldberg’s chromatic inventiveness and deft use of line enable her to create wondrous pictorial journeys marked by concentrations of tension and fluidity.