Modernism is presenting seven paintings and nine works on paper by Sheldon Greenberg in Syncretic Overlays. Reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg, Greenberg appropriates familiar iconography to pay homage to masters who have shaped artistic expression and to explore how their influence resonates in contemporary practice.
The paintings borrow imagery from Old Masters such as Jean Siméon Chardin’s Boy with a Spinning-Top (1738) and Modern Masters like Edgar Degas’s Race Horses (c. 1885-1888), Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1908), Henri Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude (1935), and Balthaus’s Les Enfants Blanchard (1937) and Thérèse sur une banquette (1939). Having admired these historic paintings for decades, Sheldon Greenberg wonders whether they might gain new admirers if they were to be reconceived as contemporary art. In pursuit of this question, Greenberg critically broke down what he saw and systematically reconstituted the most fascinating elements in his own contemporary style.
The works on paper offer us insight into Greenberg’s process.
While at first glance many appear seemingly abstract, peering through translucent layers of color, the images obscured beneath almost become visible and the artist’s method of redacting visual information to create a more complex amalgamation is revealed.