Some of Lynne Golob Gelfman’s characteristic grids are scratched into thick paint; others unfold in carefully laid out patterns of isosceles triangles, or collapse in on themselves into overlapping, accusatory black x’s. But all of Gelfman’s paintings consider the role of the square in a world of squares, the state of overlapping crosses, the grid as both an inalienable fact of life and something that is dissolving before our very eyes. In a prescient interview with PAMM two years before her death, she spoke to this directly. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how the grid represents a secure structure and how, as our society falls apart, the grids in the paintings seem to be dissolving,” she said in 2018, going on to call the structure “a metaphor for environmental and ethical collapse.”
Moving from room to room in “Constructive Arguments”, the retrospective show on her career and connections with other local artists on display on Lincoln Road until this weekend, each painting by Gelfman feels like a clear reflection of its moment in history and geographic place. From the skipping-light wave patterns she would continuously return to from her 1970s thru series to the almost acrobatic primary colors of 1984’s ca 9 (kolbart) to burqa pink dripping from 2006, Gelfman turns each grid into a time capsule of her experience bumping against the structures of an evolving city and discontinuous world.
Known for inviting young artists and newcomers to the city into her home, Gelfman’s legacy as a mentor and friend who shaped the Miami art scene is as evident in the work on display in the gallery as her creative prescience. When she arrived in Miami in the 1970s, the city looked vastly different from the setting of her exhibition today. But Gelfman was able to see something in the light and geometry here that others missed, and worked in conversation with the explosive architectural and artistic development of the place over the last fifty years to create paintings that feel deeply tied to Miami’s creative legacy in their constant adaptability. Some canvases become unstretched, or woven over; even before these arguments, Gelfman’s work was the product of many conversations and hours of mentorship. But it’s through these new conversations with contemporaries that her work–and grid–lives on, and continues to comment on the place of its origin.
The other artists who are presented in conversation reinterpret her trademark pattern in formats as varied as Gelfmans. Some, like Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s tile-and-bubble assemblages, play with the imagery of squares and water that re-occur in Gelfman’s work about Miami. Others, like Eugenio Espinoza, engage with the grid as a window to nothing (“Impenetrable Negro”). Gulfman’s 2004 lummus park - blue 2 reimagines the pattern as a spray-painted chain link fence on a tarp, and Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova’s sculptures in the same room use cleaning supplies and protective fences to continue that conversation about access and elite spaces.
Frances Trombly’s draped weavings evoke the textiles that first interested Gelfman in geometric design as a young painter, and in their sunset color seem an appropriate tribute to an artist who was fascinated by light and its play on water. Loriel Beltrán’s monumental Chriaroscuro Nebulae towers over the exhibition in its grief; in its slashed apart layers of thick dark paint, we find that all of Gelfman’s trademark light has left the room.
And yet at 1108 Lincoln Road, the artist still feels quite present. For her thru series, Gelfman would often paint the back of her canvases, as if trying to access this pattern that lay beneath what most would think of as the work, against the wall, sight unseen, in the darkness where the light could not reach. Even after leaving the exhibition, her grids continued to follow me: in the unexpected crossing of two palm leaves, the pavers in the driveway, and the pixels on this very screen.
SAVE THE DATE:
What: Constructive Arguments: Aesthetic Dialogues with the Work of Lynne Golob Gelfman
When: on view through December 22
Time: from 12-6pm
Where: 1108 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, Fl 33139
More Info: https://www.lynnegolobgelfman.net/events/constructive-arguments