Majestad V, 2009
Betty Gold
Steel and paint
96" x 48" x 36"
Photo: courtesy of Gebert Gallery
LOS ANGELES
Betty Gold: “Color’form”
at Gebert Gallery, Venice, CA
Painter and sculptor Betty Gold takes science as the starting point for her lush geometrical abstractions. As she herself often notes, geometry means the measuring of the earth, and her primary structural foundation is the human body. In her naturalism, laws being derived from nature must therefore be universally applicable. Her precision atmospherics describe a kind of bridge between art and science, exploring sensuality and unique experience, while never losing sight of science’s basis in observed phenomena. Her paintings on canvas and paper tend to portray variations on a fluid choreography of translucent lily-pad-like slices, kaleidoscopic sound waves, and tidal cross-sections with very little spatial dimensions inside the picture plane in an explosion of scale a la “Fantastic Voyage.” Then again, Picos II (acrylic on handmade paper, 50 x 36 inches) could almost be a pine forest, or a parsed agrarian landscape. That’s the point of geometry—its conclusions can reliably be sustained across macro and micro matters.