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.
