Michael Goldberg : Perpetual Motion

A New York native, Michael Goldberg emerged from the tendrils of post-World War II America by way of oft referred-to Second Generation Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by the work of Willem de Kooning, Arshille Gorky, and Hans Hoffman, Goldberg worked from this new center of the art world, post-World War II New York, having studied directly under Hoffman himself. With a style that began in the 1940s with blunt, decisive, geometric shapes of primary color, his work grew into a more gestural approach in the years that followed. Comparing Goldberg’s approach to his painting of the late 1940s to the early 1950s, works such as Untitled, 1949, and Untitled, 1951-52, with the painting Casserine Pass from 1959, the substantial presence of geometric shape gives way to the far more gestural style that the artist would continue to groom and develop throughout his career. Here, delicate renderings with gouache and watercolor on paper such as Untitled, 1949, give way to powerful, aggressive works on canvas, with the authority of size to match. Throughout his fifty-plus year career as an artist, this play between the aggressive and gestural and the equally energetic and tightly woven work of his later paintings, the breadth transition of his stylistic approaches will be on view. Included in the exhibition will be four works from the University Art Museum Gordon F. Hampton Collection, and numerous works from private collections and Southern California institutions. The public reception for Perpetual Motion: Michael Goldberg is on September 25th and will include a gallery talk between Bill Berkson and Manny Silverman, owner, Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, representing Michael Goldberg on the West Coast. Berkson, the poet Frank O’Hara, and artist Michael Goldberg moved in the circle known as the New York School in the 1950s. They were close friends, collaborating on numerous projects that crossed the boundaries of visual art and poetry. Berkson will read excerpts from O’hara’s poems “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘S Birth and Other Births),” and “Why Am I Not a Painter”. The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition includes 31 color plates and essays by: art critic and curator David Anfam, an authority on modern American art; poet, Bill Berkson, an intimate friend of Goldberg’s; and UAM Assistant Curator Elizabeth Anne Hanson.

Michael Goldberg 

Perpetual Motion