Lynne Golob Gelfman
Works on Paper, 1960s–2020
Curated by Loriel Beltrán and Aramis Gutierrez

Public Opening: Sunday, March 8th, 6–8:30 PM
Preview: Friday, March 7th, 11 AM–5 PM

Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944–2020) was a painter who lived and worked in Miami, FL. While mostly recognized by her paintings, her works on paper have rarely been exhibited. This exhibition brings together examples from across five decades, offering a focused view of a vital yet 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 shaped generations of painters working in abstraction 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 restrictions of the picture plane. When color begins to enter the work, it operates 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, shifting emphasis—if only temporarily—to the triangle as a primary unit. These works test the boundary between geometric precision and perceptual experience, where sharp diagonals suggest horizon lines, landscapes, or fleeting spatial illusions. The series marks a widening 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. Though the works on paper 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, or 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, debris, fencing. 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.

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 places these works on paper in their rightful place within the arc of her career, illuminating the depth and continuity of an artist who never ceased to question what painting could become.