Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of four major paintings and related smaller works by Shirley Goldfarb presented online. A fully illustrated catalogue with essay by Lilly Wei will be available as well as a video tour of the exhibition with narration by Suzie O'Neill.
Over the period in this exhibition, 1957-1970, Goldfarb’s abstractions moved increasingly from Abstract Expressionism towards monochrome paintings. Significantly her painterly influences include French Impressionism and Pointillism with an eye to color and light. Working increasingly with a pallet knife to apply paint, these canvases are highly tactile.
Goldfarb and her husband, who was also an artist, moved from New York to Paris in 1954 on the GI Bill. They lived and worked in a small studio in Montparnasse until her untimely death in 1980. As Lilly Wei notes in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Paris was liberating for Goldfarb:
The narrative of abstract painting in America, in particular abstract expressionist painting—once a gated, (white) male preserve—has undergone radical revisions in the past few years. The previously overlooked contributions by women artists--Native American, white, Black, Hispanic, Asian—are at last being acknowledged, necessitating a long overdue re-evaluation of the movement. Although each story was individual, there were common societal forces that impinged upon these women’s lives and careers in ways that did not hamper male artists—in America, France and elsewhere. Paris was in some ways seemingly more open minded, particularly in the milieux Goldfarb habituated.
Goldfarb is currently included in a number of significant museum exhibitions in the U.S. and France. The Soulages museum in Rodez recently presented an exhibition of women painters of the 1950s in Paris; Femmes années 50. Au fil de l’abstraction, peinture et sculpture. The Musée d'arts de Nantes and the Musée Fabre Montpellier are organizing American Artists in France between 1946 and 1964 and New York University's Grey Art Gallery’s upcoming show Americans in Paris: Artists working in France, 1946-1962, opens in New York in early 2022.
For more information please contact Anthony Torrano Anthony@lorettahoward.com