Exhibition Review: Greg Goldberg, Perimeter Paintings

National Arts Club Installation Image

Greg Goldberg (American, born in 1973) distills light and color, two of the basic elements of painting, into open-ended visual narratives.

His latest series, Perimeter Paintings, is currently on view at the National Arts Club in New York, where they are part of the lineup inaugurating the renovated lower galleries.

Unlike his prior vertical brushstroke compositions, Goldberg uses the edges of the canvas as a structural starting point. Evolving over many months, the paintings develop an internal logic as they react to seasonal light and the evolving color structure. 

The architectonic order is composed of gestural marks and sensual hues in which individual, sequential relationships gradually form a complex, tight knit web. Both meditative and dramatic, the paintings are a visual history of this accretion of color and brushstrokes.

Perimeter Painting #4
2018-19 11/29-6/17 40"x42" Oil on linen

Inspired by the radical palette of Renaissance master Jacopo Pontormo, Goldberg builds on concentric experiments of Frank Stella and Joseph Albers. However, unlike those artists, there is nothing predetermined about Goldberg’s approach. Instead, his is a continued improvisation, resulting in a mythopoetic space, at once timeless yet rooted in real time.

Goldberg started working Perimeter Paintings in 2018 and the earlier paintings are characterized by bright, optimistic palette. The last three paintings in the show were completed during the pandemic, and their mood is more somber. The latest painting in the show features broken brushstrokes, evocative of a phalanx formation.  

Included in the exhibition are color charts created by the artist, that, like a diary, reveal Goldberg’s creative process of building up the work pigment by pigment, layer by layer, over many months. A Morse code for the painter, they include details of pigments, mediums brush size and dates.

Perimeter Painting Broken Brushstroke #1
2020-21 30"x30" Oil on linen

A native of New York City, Goldberg has spent years between studios in Times Square and in Cornwall, Connecticut, allowing him to observe the quality of light as it transforms in both the urban and rural setting. Since the pandemic, he and his family relocated to Cornwall and the latest works reflect the shift to life steeped in nature.

His works are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Estee Lauder Foundation and numerous private collections. In 2014, he was commissioned to create seven large-scale paintings for the Freedom Tower at One World Trade Center, for the opening of the new skyscraper.  

National Arts Club Installation Image