Sullivan Goss will exhibit 13 works of art made between 1938 and 1991 by Sidney Gordin, (1918-1996).
“Gordin’s career began in the headiest days of the early 1940s in New York, where he and friends like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline began to push the boundaries of what art might do, from communicating a particular idea to evoking the idea of creative musing itself,” Sullivan and Goss said.
Jazz improvisation was surely a big inspiration. His first real success came in the early 1950s with support from institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MOMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. He was shown by Grace Borgenicht Gallery in Manhattan.
In 1958, Gordin was hired to teach at UC Berkeley, where he came into contact with the West Coast avant garde. His friends there included Hassel Smith and Elmer Bischoff.
Following his earliest experiments with combining cubist form and futurist motion, Gordin moved into abstract expressionism and then direct metal sculpture – a new metal sculpture practice involving welding of wires and shapes as opposed to casting.
In around 1960, he began to make painted wood constructions. All of his life, he moved back and forth between painting and sculpture and between metal and wood.
The exhibit traces Gordin’s whole evolution, from an Art Deco ink drawing made at Cooper Union in about 1939 to an organic space form he made in San Francisco in 1991.
The Estate of Sidney Gordin has been represented by Sullivan Goss since 2008. His work is held in a large number of major museum collections including the National Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The Gordin display accompanies an exhibit by Sarah Vedder, a local landscape painter who trained in the era of Abstract Expressionism.