Glenn Goldberg: Other Place

About

Born in The Bronx, Glenn Goldberg was exposed to the anti-establishment sentiments of 1970s’s America; a time when socio-political concerns took precedence over academic and professional aspirations. For Goldberg, it was a continuation of the 1960’s counterculture in which music, drugs, sex, peace and love flourished alongside political protest. The dream-like iconography of Goldberg’s paintings captures the spirit of this 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 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.