Goldberg’s visual language is built through repetition and transformation. Birds, flowers, dots, borders, and other emblematic forms recur throughout his work, shifting in meaning according to their placement and relationship to one another. As Goldberg explains, “a lot of what I’m doing has to do with how a simple image can over and over again be reconstituted in a different context.”
Each painting is unplanned and created without preparatory drawings. Goldberg begins with a ground and builds additively, working from back to front and accumulating forms until each element finds its place. He often works on several paintings simultaneously, allowing them to develop in conversation. Thousands of individually painted dots create rhythm and energy, while borders and architectural structures provide an underlying order.
The resulting works are both carefully orchestrated and open-ended, revealing the time, labor, and decisions embedded in their surfaces. new gardens embraces possibility and an unapologetically optimistic spirit, inviting viewers to slow down and return to the paintings repeatedly. As Goldberg writes, they might offer “a place to wander”—a respite and a reason to look again.
Glenn Goldberg was born in the Bronx in 1953 and attended the New York Studio School and Queens College during his undergraduate education. He later continued his graduate studies at Queens College to receive his MFA. In 1996 he was named the Heilman Artist and since has received grants from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Edward Albee Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Goldberg’s work has been shown extensively throughout the US and internationally, and is held in numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Academy of Arts and Letters, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. Goldberg has taught at various institutions including The Cooper Union, NY Studio School, Brandeis University, Queens College, and Parsons School of Design. He has also been a panelist and visiting artist for MFA painting programs at Yale, Columbia, Boston University, Hunter College, The Kansas City Art Institute, and others. In 2023, Goldberg was commissioned to create a public arts project at the E. 149th St subway station in the Bronx by the New York MTA Arts and Design Commission. Goldberg lives and works in New York City.
