Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 6

Sidney Gordin
"Untitled" Sidney Gordin, Abstract Metal Steel Sculpture

1958

About the Item

Sidney Gordin Untitled, 1958 Incised with initials Welded Steel 15 x 10 1/2 x 6 inches Provenance: Eric Firestone Gallery, New York On October 24, 1918, Sidney Gordin was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia. He spent his early years in Shanghai, China. At the age of four, he moved with his family to New York. Gordin’s nephew, Eliot Nemzer recalls that when Gordin was a child he attended “a dinner party with his parents. Someone showed him a book of pictures that when thumbed through quickly made the image appear to move. This person then gave him a wad of blank papers and something to write with. Sid created a similar type of moving image with his materials. All the adults at the party became quite excited [and] praised his efforts. Sid told me he thought this was a pivotal experience in guiding him towards his vocation.” During his formative years at Brooklyn Technical High School, he briefly contemplated the idea of becoming an architect; yet, by the time he enrolled at Cooper Union, he was determined to become a professional artist. There, he studied under Morris Kantor (1896-1974) and Leo Katz (1887-1982), devoting much of his class schedule to drawing and painting. In 1949, Gordin turned his attention to sculpture for the first time. Three years later, he held his first solo-exhibition at Bennington College in Vermont and the Peter Cooper Gallery in New York. That same year he was accepted into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s group exhibition American Sculpture 1951. His metal and wire constructions were shown alongside such sculptors as Alexander Calder (1898-1976), William Zorach (1887-1966), and George Rickey (1907-2002). Over the following years, he regularly exhibited in the annual exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art, while also holding yearly solo-exhibitions at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York. Three days into his first solo-exhibition at Borgenicht in 1953, the Whitney made their first acquisition of his work by purchasing a metal construction for their permanent collection. By the late 1950s, he began to employ wood in his sculptures, which eventually led to the creation of painted constructions. With a renewed interest in painting, Gordin often alternated between these painted wood constructions and two-dimensional painting up until his death in the early 90s. Following teaching stints at both Sarah Lawrence College and the New School for Social Research in New York, Gordin accepted a position at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art in 1958. Amidst the emerging Bay Area art scene, Gordin taught alongside such artists as Peter Voulkos, Joan Brown, and Jay de Feo. Coinciding with his move to Berkeley, he held his first solo-exhibition on the West Coast at San Francisco’s seminal Dilexi Gallery. In 1962, the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco mounted his first one-man museum show. Yet, while maintaining his professorship at Berkeley, Gordin never completely cut his ties to the East Coast. He maintained a studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which he often visited throughout the years, and continued to appear in several exhibitions organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Zabriskie Gallery well into the 90s. Over the next several decades, he was included in prominent group exhibitions such as the Whitney’s Precisionist View in American Art and Geometric Abstraction in America; the exhibition West Coast Now, which traveled from the Portland Art Museum to the Seattle Art Museum, the De Young, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; and the Oakland Museum’s exhibition, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the course of his career, he was also included in shows in Paris, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. He retired from teaching in 1986 as Professor Emeritus of Art. Following his retirement, he, along with several members of the Berkeley Art Department, founded the Breakfast Club, an eclectic mix of Bay Area artists and students that met weekly for discussions about art and politics and held regular group exhibitions for many years. Three years before his death in 1993, he was inducted as a Member of the National Academy of Design.
  • Creator:
    Sidney Gordin (1918-1996, American)
  • Creation Year:
    1958
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 10 in (25.4 cm)Width: 5 in (12.7 cm)Depth: 5 in (12.7 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New York, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1841212443452
More From This SellerView All
  • "Roland, " George Sugarman, Abstract Steel Sculpture
    By George Sugarman
    Located in New York, NY
    George Sugarman (1912 - 1999) Roland, 1970 Patinated steel 17 3/8 x 16 x 5 1/4 inches Incised with the artist's signature and numbered "15/17" on the underside Manufactured by Lippin...
    Category

    1970s Abstract Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

  • "Message I, " Boris Margo, White Surrealist 3D Painting
    By Boris Margo
    Located in New York, NY
    Boris Margo (1920 -1995) Message I, circa 1970 Stretched canvas over relief 22 x 27 x 1 1/2 inches Best known as a painter of surrealist imagery, Boris Margo was born in Wolotschisk, Ukraine, in Russia. In 1919 he enrolled at the Polytechnik of Art at Odessa, and in 1924 received a grant to study at the Futemas (Workshop for the Art of the Future) in Moscow. A second grant enabled him to study the work of the Old Masters in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and to attend Pavel Filonov's Analytical School of Art in 1927. In 1928 Margo received a certificate from the Polytechnik and immigrated to Montreal, where he worked as a muralist for a year. Moving to New York City in 1930, he studied at the Roerich Museum, and two years later began teaching there. He began experimenting with celluloid and acetone in his printmaking and was also an early user of the decalomania technique in oil painting. In 1943 he became an American citizen. Five years later Margo founded a Creative Art Seminar (later called Artists Gallery) in Orlando, Florida, and a year later established a similar venture in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Margo's first solo exhibition was at the Artists Gallery in New York City. Other important shows were held at the Brooklyn Museum, the Tweed Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and the Michael Rosenfeld...
    Category

    1970s Abstract Geometric Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Canvas

  • "Untitled, " Seymour Fogel, Geometric Abstraction, Texas Hard-Edge
    By Seymour Fogel
    Located in New York, NY
    Seymour Fogel Untitled Oil on illustration board construction 10 x 7 1/2 inches Provenance: Estate of the artist Charles and Faith McCracken Larry and Trish Heichel Private Collection Seymour Fogel was born in New York City on August 24, 1911. He studied at the Art Students League and at the National Academy of Design under George Bridgeman and Leon Kroll. When his formal studies were concluded in the early 1930s he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera who was then at work on his controversial Rockefeller Center mural. It was from Rivera that he learned the art of mural painting. Fogel was awarded several mural commissions during the 1930s by both the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, among them his earliest murals at the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York in 1936, a mural in the WPA Building at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, a highly controversial mural at the U.S. Post Office in Safford, Arizona (due to his focus on Apache culture) in 1941 and two murals in what was then the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C., also in 1941. Fogel's artistic circle at this time included Phillip Guston, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Rockwell Kent and Willem de Kooning. In 1946 Fogel accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin and became one of the founding artists of the Texas Modernist Movement. At this time he began to devote himself solely to abstract, non-representational art and executed what many consider to be the very first abstract mural in the State of Texas at the American National Bank in Austin in 1953. He pioneered the use of Ethyl Silicate as a mural medium. Other murals and public works of art done during this time (the late 1940s and 1950s) include the Baptist Student Center at the University of Texas (1949), the Petroleum Club in Houston (1951) and the First Christian Church, also in Houston (1956), whose innovative use of stained glass panels incorporated into the mural won Fogel a Silver Medal from the Architectural League of New York in 1958. Fogel relocated to the Connecticut-New York area in 1959. He continued the Abstract Expressionism he had begun exploring in Texas, and began experimenting with various texturing media for his paintings, the most enduring of which was sand. In 1966 he was awarded a mural at the U.S. Federal Building in Fort Worth, Texas. The work, entitled "The Challenge of Space", was a milestone in his artistic career and ushered in what has been termed the Transcendental/Atavistic period of his art, a style he pursued up to his death in 1984. Painted and raw wood sculpture...
    Category

    Mid-20th Century Abstract Geometric Abstract Paintings

    Materials

    Oil, Board

  • "Untitled (Scrap Metal 4415), " Lucien Smith Anti-War Sculpture
    By Lucien Smith
    Located in New York, NY
    Lucien Smith (American, b. 1989) Untitled (Scrap Metal 4415), 2013 Steel 35 x 35 x 15 inches Provenance: OHWOW, Los Angeles Private Collection Wright, 2015, Lot 139 One of the most highly-regarded contemporary artists, Lucien Smith is a name whose work people (and institutions) have been paying much attention to since he graduated Cooper Union. He produced readymade sculptures that the artist has secured and appropriated from the annual Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky. Consisting of propane tanks, oil drums, automobile parts, and even a full-length truck, the metal objects have all been fired on by thousands of rounds of ammunition from handguns, assault rifles, fully automatic rifles, to a powerful Gatling Gun...
    Category

    2010s Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

  • "Voyage I, " Rosamond Berg, Female Contemporary Minimalist Sculpture Artist
    Located in New York, NY
    Rosamond Berg (American, 1931 - 2018) Voyage I, 1982 Mixed media construction including hand-dyed cotton cloth pouches 24 x 24 inches Signed, titled an...
    Category

    1980s Contemporary Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Cotton, Thread, Glass, Wood

  • "Tropical Parrot with Woman, " Corneille, Carved Wood Sculpture with Bird
    By Corneille
    Located in New York, NY
    Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo (Corneille) Tropical Parrot with Woman, circa 1970 Signed: Corneille Edition Number: 6 of 8 Constructed and Painted wood 39" high x 40 1/2" wide x 6" ...
    Category

    1970s Figurative Sculptures

    Materials

    Wood, Paint

You May Also Like
  • "Bloom No. 4" from the Bloom Series, Abstract, Organic Sculpture in Steel
    By Norman Mooney
    Located in New York, NY
    Bloom No. 4 from the Bloom Series by Norman Mooney Mirror-polished stainless steel, birch plywood base Inspired by the work of the 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel and his study...
    Category

    2010s Abstract Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Metal, Steel, Stainless Steel

  • Jose Soto, Focus, 2017, Steel, Mirror, Plexiglass, Wood, Adhesive
    By Jose Soto
    Located in Darien, CT
    FOCUS is a public art sculpture about photographic vision and how it shapes the way we see the world. It is concerned with the viewer’s growing visual perception and bodily experienc...
    Category

    2010s Abstract Geometric Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

  • Untitled
    By James Guy
    Located in New York, NY
    Signed (at lower center): Guy
    Category

    Mid-20th Century Abstract Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

  • Joseph Wesner "Sculpture from the Pherein Series" Abstract Sculpture Signed
    Located in Detroit, MI
    SALE ONE WEEK ONLY “Sculpture from the Pherein Series” is a monumental piece named with the Greek word “pherein” meaning both to bear and to bring. It is made of welded steel and wood and is one of several similar, but different pieces belonging to a series created by Wesner and named The Pherein Series. Joseph Wesner...
    Category

    Late 20th Century Abstract Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

  • "NESTING:HOLD", Sculpture, Wood, Steel, Cold Resin, Reed, Mounted on Wood Base
    By Eva Ennist
    Located in Toronto, Ontario
    Eva Ennist, a mixed media and fiber artist, travels extensively through the Far East, gathering materials and techniques for her practice. The sculpture "NE...
    Category

    21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Geometric Abstract Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

  • Wall Steel Black Sphere Abstract Sculpture
    Located in Valencia, ES
    Made in Ukraine, 2020. Black. Minimalistic. Abstract. Spheres: from molecules to planets. Look around: mono sphere or billions of small combinations o...
    Category

    2010s Abstract Geometric Figurative Sculptures

    Materials

    Steel

Recently Viewed

View All