ADOLPH GOTTLIEB

The exhibition focuses on two major images from Gottlieb’s later work: Bursts and Imaginary Landscapes. In the early 1950s, Gottlieb began to further pare down his compositions resulting in horizontally-oriented Imaginary Landscape paintings, such as the 7-by-12-foot work Groundscape (1956) included in this exhibition. Observing that the ‘all-over’ motif that he had begun to utilise in 1941 had become a common element of American abstract painting, Gottlieb radically compressed his image to the mutually-opposing dual registers of the Imaginary Landscape. In these paintings, the composition is divided into an upper and lower horizontal area, each one characterised by different painting techniques to yield seemingly opposing emotional material, while the paintings ultimately balance as a complex single image.

By 1956, Gottlieb began to evolve these landscapes from a horizontal to a vertical format, culminating in the creation of the image that has come to be known as the Burst. These atmospheric grounds of colour on which a contained, ovoid shape at the upper half hovers above an opposing, expansive shape painted in the lower half remained an active element of Gottlieb’s art until his death in 1974. In early Burst paintings, such as Exclamation (1958) and Cadmium Red Above Black (1959), Gottlieb began to move the painterly fields at the bottom of his Imaginary Landscapes away from the edges of the canvas–reducing their size but maintaining their dynamic, gestural treatment. Echoing one another, the two forms exist in a universe of colour, encompassing subtle variations in hue and density that engage the viewer.

While at first seemingly simple, the motifs served as vibrant territory for Gottlieb to experiment in colour theory, asymmetrical compositions, and innovative painting techniques, and to extend the emotional impact of abstraction that he and his friend Mark Rothko had claimed as a focus of their work in the early 1940s. Following their first exhibition in January 1957 at the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Bursts inspired a broad range of interpretations–from allusions to threats of the Cold War to the vastness and majesty of the universe. Never prescriptive and always dedicated to the individualised, experiential power of art, Gottlieb observed in 1962: ‘It’s really...an attempt to express abstractly almost all my experience which is emotional. And, at the same time, I attach a great deal of importance to the thought process and a kind of intellectual approach to painting; and I can’t separate them. I can’t compartmentalise and break down...because the whole effort of my work is to make a synthesis of all these things. In other words, to get a totality of my experience, which is emotional, irrational and also thoughtful.’