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Yahoo!Sullivan Goss continues to explore the cultural legacy of 20th-century émigrés to California in this exhibition of the work of distinguished sculptor, painter, and art professor Sidney Gordin. Born into the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gordin moved from Russia to Brooklyn, New York, in 1922 at the age of four. Gordin left New York in the late 1950s to take a teaching position at UC Berkeley, where he remained for three decades. This show pieces together the disparate styles and media of a vigorously talented man who managed to maintain allegiance to the principles of Russian Constructivism while changing along with the dynamic environment of the American art scene.
Gordin’s most original contributions to 20th-century art are his sculptures, several of which are on display. Constructivism claimed to provide a wholly new way of perceiving space, and Gordin’s wire sculptures, like line drawings floating in air, achieve this ambitious outcome. The jazzy, sprung tension of “45-58” from 1958 shows the artist at his best, deftly balancing freedom and geometry in a unified yet unpredictable form. Gordin’s hammered bronzes are also intriguing. A piece like “1-60” displays the same advanced composition that one sees in the works done with wire, but translated into biomorphic blobs that have become beautifully and intricately discolored.
As a painter, Gordin marries the stringent seriousness of Constructivism to the vibrant colors and fizzy contrasts of pop. Among his flat images, the big, horizontal, and Matisse-like blues and grays of “3-88” stand out, as do the luminous clarity and retrospective references of the late work “1-95.”
Some of Gordin’s paintings employ crisp, three-dimensional cutouts. Gordin adapts his sculptural sensibility to the demands of color field painting in “8-81” by building a grid through the repetition of simple shapes, arriving at a 4×5 series of brightly colored concentric cylinders that hold gray spheres within a matte gray background box. In these works, Gordin makes the vocabulary of sculptor Donald Judd work at the intimate scale of assemblage genius Joseph Cornell — an impressive feat. Abstract expressionism influenced Gordin as well, and can be seen animating the weird, tooth-shaped lozenges that populate his paintings of the late 1960s.
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Sidney Gordin does one thing that I cannot accept. It's the masking tape paintings done around 1980. Masking tape is for house painters. Even as a joke or used to imply our technological era, it always irritates me.
In 1982 I completed a sculpture course taught by Gordin at UC Berkeley. He was a wonderful teacher who gave us the tools and ideas to work. I remember we had one project to buy balsa wood and make a sculpture connecting the wood with straight pins.
Another was a clay relief, mine turned out very much like one of the pieces in this show, http://www.sullivangoss.com/paintings/De...
At that time, I did not speak much, so, I did not connect with most professors. However, I did connect with Gordin, I remember when it came time to paint my relief, he invited me to his office to choose the right color of paint. It turns out, I chose white, just like the the piece in the show. His office had 4 or 5 book cases, to the ceiling full of art books.
After I completed the class, I was interested to see more of his work. Since then, this show is the largest I have seen. It is well done and I can see how his worked changed through time.
I like this painting http://www.sullivangoss.com/paintings/De... because he mixes the sharp tape-ish line with a free brush.
peacock (anonymous profile)
April 6, 2008 at 5:12 p.m. (Suggest removal)
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