THREE ASPECTS OF ABSTRACTION

SHARON GOLD
PAM ADLER GALLERY

“Gold’s eight paintings of 1985 on view are a radical departure from her systemic, reductive abstractions of the 1970’s. Geometry has given way to suggestive organic forms. Precedents for this shift lie within the artist’s oeuvre, particularly her gestural paintings of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s derived from Abstract Expressionism and lyrical abstraction of the ‘60s. Her highly structured, quasi-monochromatic paintings of the ‘70s retained the intuitive, gestural quality of the earlier work by means of layered, manipulated surface (in Gold’s words, her “nascent signature”). Now all elements of the painting—form, varied color, and surface—emerge from mark-making.

Gold’s “process orientation” and larger scale have been linked with Abstract Expressions. She cites an earlier source, Albert Pinkham Ryder, for her development of light, a recurrent theme, as indicated by such titles as Heart of Light and Light and Passage. No longer interested in making paintings primarily as objects, Gold allows spatial realities to inform her poetic pictures which are non-referential but real, as if one could move partially in and out of them and among the organics forms.”

Gail Stavitsky

ARTS MAGAZINE
April 1986