Douglas Goldberg
Latency
September 6—October 19, 2024
Opening Reception: September 6, 6—8 pm
Douglas Goldberg, The Kiss, 2023. Turkish Afyon Marble, 18 x 16 x 15 1/4 inches / 45.7 x 40.6 x 38.7 cm
Ulterior Gallery presents Latency, Douglas Goldberg’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The ongoing Fear series explores the contours of anxiety. Hand-carved entirely out of marble, Goldberg’s sculptures take the form of objects draped with shrouds. Despite the apparent stillness of stone, works in the exhibition vibrate at ambivalent frequencies.
Goldberg both eschews and provokes representation. He mobilizes marble’s seductive tactility to execute a trompe l’oeil—its capacity to assume the liquid qualities of fabric, yet evoke the contours of the object that appears to lie beneath. But of course there is no object, there is no behind-the-curtain. Just as the Wizard of Oz is revealed to be simply a man sheltering behind his projections, the anxiety radiating from the concealed entity and the mechanism of its obfuscation are one and the same.
In The Kiss, the shrouded object’s ambiguity resolves in the form of two skulls locked in a kiss. Without lips, nerves, or muscles, what remains is the clack of bone on bone (or rather, stone on stone). For queer men coming of age in the late 1980’s and early ‘90s, homosexuality amounted to a death sentence–love and desire, comorbid with illness and mortality. Despite movements toward destigmatization and advances in medical treatment, queerness remains haunted by precariousness, as if amidst ripples in a pool of water or bedsheets rumpled by a departed lover. Is the shroud a censor or a shelter? Like clandestine lovers sneaking a kiss beneath the sheets, hiding from God’s all-seeing eye, or simply the mischievous eroticism of sharing a private act. There is a peculiar intimacy to the skeletal embrace, deeper than skin deep. Goldberg’s hand allows the viewer, an outsider, to witness the topology of this impossible kind of touch through the marble scrim, enabled by his labor-intensive and self-taught practice.
A sequence of wall-mounted sculptures imply draped frames or mirrors. The artist refers to these thwarted images as self-portraits, each describing, perhaps mourning, a different period in his coming-of-age. Here, the malleability and multiplicity of marble comes to the forefront. Variously fleshy, veined, velvet, or matte, as a sequence, the panels present an implicit narrative. They imbue the striations and sediments–incidents of material–with incidents from Goldberg’s own life. And yet, there remains a shying-away inscribed in the paradox of representation and obfuscation presented by the sculptures. When the source of repulsion is located in the self, we are left with the uncanny notion that the call is coming from inside the house.
Douglas Goldberg was born in Englewood, NJ, in 1971. He earned his BA in Art at Messiah College in Pennsylvania and received his MFA at the Maryland Institute’s Mount Royal School of Art in Baltimore, MD. His work has been exhibited for the past two decades in a variety of private and public spaces in Philadelphia; Baltimore; Washington D.C.; Laholm, Sweden; Portland, ME; and New York City. Goldberg has also been included in art fairs including the Dallas Art Fair, and The Armory Show. He lives and works between New York City and the Hudson Valley and is represented by Ulterior in New York, NY.
Press
Will Heinrich. What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in September. New York Times, September 19, 2024 (web) / September 20, 2024 (print)
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