SHARON GOLD BIOGRAPHY

Sharon Gold was born in 1949 in the Bronx, New York. Gold attended Hunter College from 1967 to 1968 and Columbia University from 1968 to 1970. In 1972, she received a fellowship to the MacDowell Colony residency. Gold earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 1976 and also presented her first hit solo exhibition at Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery in SoHo, New York. During the late 1970s and 1980s, Gold's work was championed by Joseph Masheck, the editor-in-chief of Artforum, who wrote extensively about her work and included her in the 1982 MoMA PS1 exhibition titled Critical Perspectives alongside Sean Scully, Yoko Ono, Elizabeth Murray, Walter Robinson, Eric Fischl, Deborah Kass, Vered Lieb, and others. 

Sharon Gold produced her monochromatic and geometric abstractions prolifically for decades while meticulously documenting, selling, and storing her art and studio detritus, which has been immaculately preserved. She won widespread critical acclaim in the 1980s as her art was reviewed in Artforum, Art News, Art in America, New York Magazine, and the New York Times. Hal Foster discussed Gold's abstractions as impacting the painting's existential form in Artforum, stating, "Objectness is posed by the deep support, deposed by the spatiality of the black, then reposed in the layered crust of the surface. The support is at once a projection outward and an armature inward (like a windowsill), the dictated resolution comes in the opacity of the surface, violated by a line of 'transparency' here and there."

In 1981, Gold received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. During the 1980s, she presented solo exhibitions at Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York, Galerie Michael Storrer in Zurich, San Francisco Art Institute, Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York, Virginia Commonwealth University, 55 Mercer Street in New York, Nina Freudenheim Gallery in Buffalo, Pam Adler Gallery in New York, John Davis Gallery in Akron, 85 Mercer Street in New York, and Stephen Rosenberg Gallery in New York. She also taught at Princeton University, Pratt Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, San Francisco Art Institute, and the Tyler School of Art while writing for Re-View Magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G/S, and Artforum.