The Estate of Lynne Golob Gelfman is pleased to announce Constructive Arguments: Aesthetic Dialogues with the Work of Lynne Golob Gelfman, opening on December 2, 2024. The exhibition, curated by Tobias Ostrander and Natalia Zuluaga, presents a series of dialogues between Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944-2020) and eight of her artistic contemporaries. Opening alongside Miami Art Week 2024, the exhibition follows the development and maturation of the city’s arts scene through the career of one of Miami’s most esteemed abstract artists.

Exhibition Hours:

• Mon. Dec 2 | 7 pm Public Opening

• Tue. Dec 3 - Sunday, Dec 10 | 10 am - 7 pm

• Thur. Dec 12 - Sunday, Dec 15 | 12 to 6 pm

• Thur. Dec 19 - Sunday, Dec 22 | 12 to 6 pm

PRESS RELEASE

Constructive Arguments engages Gelfman’s work in a rich visual discourse between the conceptual interests of a multi-generational group of artists, many influenced by her work–-all by her friendship: Olga de Amaral, Loriel Beltrán, Eugenio Espinoza, Gloria Garcia Lorca, Aramis Gutierrez II, Cristina Lei-Rodriguez, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, and Frances Trombly. The eight artists shown in conversation with Gelfman’s practice are the inheritors of her exploration of style, form, and technique rooted in the legacies of constructivist art and geometric abstraction. These connections emerge through the cultural and urban lenses of Miami, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Spain, as their distinct interpretations reflect shared influences when viewed side by side.

Rooted in repetition and linear forms, Gelfman’s diverse series honors and subverts her early exposure to geometric abstraction. A prolific artist, Gelfman’s seminal series thru will be shown alongside works from her series sand, burqa, surface, between and works by the eight other artists in the exhibition. In Gelfman’s early career thru series, the artist resists the formal rules of late-modernist abstraction to create irregularities through serial geometric form while flirting with chance by letting paint seep from one side of the canvas to the other. Later career explorations maintain original references to the grid. This critical engagement with the history of art—specifically with the legacy of Modernism—is as central to Gelfman’s work as it is to that of Beltrán, Espinoza, García Lorca, and Trombly. Constructive Arguments challenges the grid, turning the traditional rigidity of geometric abstraction into works of art that are compressed and folded onto themselves, shredded and hanging in fragments, or accumulated through masses of paint, all balancing the weight of the legacy of Modernism and buoyed by Miami’s vibrant culture.

Miami's urban and natural landscape influenced Gelfman’s body of work in both subtle and complex ways. Color and light dissolve together to reflect the stinging sun of South Florida. Lei Rodriguez’s stark paintings of plants emanate sticky heat just as the gold and silver reflections in Gelfman’s dune series and thru canvases reference Miami’s blinding light. Miami’s urban grid provided a constant source of inspiration, a structure against which Gelfman’s process of experimentation could play with and against the grid’s rigor and austerity.

Constructive Arguments: Aesthetic Dialogues with the work of Lynne Golob Gelfman honors the artist's contributions to a community to which she was deeply connected. Meditative, complex, and subtle, the works in this exhibition offer an opportunity to examine interconnected dialogues around the legacies of Modernist abstraction. A dynamic view across the formal and conceptual investigations that stimulated these dialogues, Constructive Arguments reveals the rich archipelagos of exchange Gelfman cultivated throughout her life.