OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, MARCH 5th | FROM 5-8pm

Sullivan Goss is proud to be able to exhibit thirteen exceptional 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. 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, he was hired to teach at U.C. 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. This exhibition traces his 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.