Lynne Golob Gelfman
Works on paper, 1960’s to 2020
Curated by Loriel Beltrán and Aramis Gutierrez
Public Opening: Sunday, March 8th, 6-8:30 PM
Preview: March 7th, 11-5 PM
Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944–2020) was a painter who lived and worked in Miami, Florida. While widely recognized for her paintings, her works on paper have rarely been exhibited. This exhibition brings together examples spanning five decades, offering a focused view of a vital yet largely unseen dimension of her practice.
Conceived and curated by Miami-based artists Aramis Gutierrez and Loriel Beltran—friends, peers, and longtime admirers of Gelfman’s work—the exhibition revisits an artist whose rigor and experimentation profoundly shaped generations of abstract painters in Miami.
Spanning from the mid-1960s through 2020, the works trace Gelfman’s sustained engagement with the grid as both structure and proposition. Early drawings from the 1960s reveal her interest in systems, repetition, and chance—echoing the logic of games such as chess, tic-tac-toe, and checkers. These pared-down compositions establish her lifelong investigation into units of form, spatial tension, and the inherent constraints of the picture plane. When color enters the work, it functions as both marker and divider, activating rhythm within the grid’s measured intervals.
In the 1970s, Gelfman’s Triangle series brought saturated color to the forefront, temporarily shifting emphasis to the triangle as a primary compositional unit. These works test the boundary between geometric precision and perceptual experience, where sharp diagonals evoke horizon lines, landscapes, or fleeting spatial illusions. The series marks both an expansion of her formal vocabulary and a deepening of her psychological and spatial concerns.
Around the same period, Gelfman initiated what would become her well-known “Tri” (or “Thru”) paintings. In a decisive break from convention, she painted on the verso of the canvas, allowing pigment to bleed through to the front surface. By relinquishing direct control of the painted mark, she introduced contingency into the grid’s logic, merging systemic order with material unpredictability. Although the works on paper included in this exhibition are painted on the face of the substrate, they reveal the careful planning and structural experimentation that underpinned those breakthrough canvases.
From the 1980s onward, Gelfman increasingly emphasized materiality in her works on paper. She incorporated varied substrates—layered, torn, and abraded—allowing fibers and seams to become active compositional elements. The grid expanded beyond an optical device to reference lived and physical structures: fabric mesh, fencing, debris. In these later works, her longstanding formal investigations open outward, engaging broader spatial and social resonances while remaining grounded in the discipline that defined her practice.
Taken together, the works presented here offer more than a supplement to Gelfman’s paintings. They reveal the studio as a site of testing, revision, and discovery—where ideas were first structured, challenged, and reimagined. This exhibition restores these works on paper to their rightful place within the arc of her career, illuminating the depth, continuity, and intellectual rigor of an artist who never ceased to question what painting could become.
CENTRAL FINE
36, NE 54 St, MIAMI, FLORIDA, 33137
Open Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday 11-5 pm
Wednesday and Friday by appointment only.
Tel: +917-306-1218
email: [email protected]
