B. BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 1924
D. WASHINGTON, D.C., 2000
Shirley Gorelick is known for her humanist paintings of subjects who have not traditionally been heroized in large-scale portraiture. She painted middle-aged couples, including a bi-racial couple, two psychoanalysts, and a wheelchair-user with her husband. She also re-examined art historical works through a contemporary female gaze, casting the Three Graces as three African-American men, for example.
A native of Brooklyn, NY, Shirley Gorelick was a student of Brooklyn College and Teachers College at Columbia University. Studying under Hans Hofmann, Gorelick experimented with several media including oil and acrylic painting, etching, silverpoint, terra cotta, marble, and wood. Although her early works largely explored Abstract Expressionism, Gorelick soon decided to go back to realism. Early on, she created a series of paintings that reinterpreted abstract and cubist masterpieces such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to which she added physical volume to Picasso’s subjects.
Shirley Gorelick
Family II, 1973
acrylic on canvas
80.0h x 70.0w in
203.2h x 177.8w cm
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Gorelick remains best known for her portraits, painted in jarring colors and heavy brushstrokes that she developed during the 1960s. They feature individuals or groups and explore the relationships between family members, friends, strangers, and the artist herself. In the 1970s, Gorelick painted another series, depicting interracial families and celebrating black women in compositions that were brutally honest and filled with psychological tension. The ambivalent expressions and solemn demeanors of the sitters force the viewer to analyze both the figures' body language and their surroundings, which frequently included objects drawn from the models' own environments.
In the context of the feminist movement, Gorelick became involved with artist-run, women’s cooperative galleries. In 1973, she became a founding member of Central Hall Artists Gallery, an all-women artist-run gallery in Port Washington, New York. Between 1975 and 1986, she had six solo exhibitions at SOHO20 and participated in numerous group shows. In 1976, Gorelick painted a nine-foot portrait of Frida Kahlo for “The Sister Chapel,” a feminist collaboration by thirteen artists which celebrated female role models and premiered its installation at P.S. 1 in Long Island City.
Gorelick’s work is found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA, among others. She is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery where she was the subject of a three-person show, What About the Human Figure (2019), and a major solo presentation of work, Shirley Gorelick: Family (2022).
Shirley Gorelick
Three Sisters II (Westchester Gauguin), 1974-76
acrylic on canvas
90h x 80w in
228.60h x 203.20w cm
SHIRGO011
Shirley Gorelick
Untitled (Lisa), c.1974
Acrylic on canvas
23 7/8h x 18w in
60.64h x 45.72w cm
Shirley Gorelick
Tess in a Blue Dress (Dr. Tess Forrest), 1980
acrylic on canvas
70h x 70w in
177.80h x 177.80w cm
SHIRGO006
Shirley Gorelick
Family II, 1973
acrylic on canvas
80h x 70w in
203.20h x 177.80w cm
SHIRGO009
Shirley Gorelick
Untitled (Libby seated)
Acrylic on canvas
36h x 36w in
91.44h x 91.44w cm
Shirley Gorelick
Untitled (seated woman in red robe)
Acrylic on canvas
50h x 47 7/8w in
127h x 121.60w cm
Shirley Gorelick
Nudes with blinds
Acrylic on canvas
50 1/8h x 58 7/8w in
127.32h x 149.54w cm
Shirley Gorelick
Nudes on Green Spread, 1966-67
acrylic on canvas
70h x 80w in
177.80h x 203.20w cm
SHIRGO001
We are pleased to announce that Shirley Gorelick’s Family II (1973) has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum as part of the museum’s permanent collection.
When Shirley Gorelick was in high school in the late 1930s, she took art classes on weekends and in the summers from the sculptor Chaim Gross and painters Moses and Raphael Soyer at the Education Alliance in New York City. Still early in the search for her own visual style, she was already quietly rebellious. She recalled in 1968 that “the painting class didn’t interest me. It was too crowded and I couldn’t see. And I felt I had to be right up front to see.” But Gorelick did pursue painting, landing in the late 1960s as a masterful painter of large-scale, realist figures. In these portraits, which she made through the early 1980s, that imperative to be right up front takes the form of a close attention to her subjects and the exchange that occurs between them and the viewer. Larger than life-size, the figures crowd into our space, so near that sometimes their bodies are truncated by the edges of the canvas.
“Family,” a new exhibition curated by Max Warsh at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York, gives an overdue look at Gorelick’s intimate and psychologically penetrating portraits of the five families who mattered most to her. These were people who did not then typically find themselves the subjects of art: middle-aged women, disabled people, mixed-race families, and older couples. David Ourlicht, one of Gorelick’s subjects and the son of Libby Dickerson, the model to whom Gorelick returned most often, said of his mother’s involvement, “The personal relationship came first.” The two women shared progressive politics, he said. “It was equal rights, women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights.”
This two-year reinstallation of the museum’s contemporary art collection examines the ways artists have produced new forms of knowledge about the world. Nearly 100 works made primarily by Black and female artists—and many new to the collection—will reframe the museum’s holdings and follow artists in their expansive thinking and prismatic explorations of social, historical, and environmental perspectives. Among the themes explored in the exhibition are care, progress, wayfinding, witnessing, reckoning, and legacy. Grouped within and across these interrelated subjects are dynamic works across media by Robert Colescott, Paul Chan, Jadé Fadojutimi, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rashid Johnson, Gisela McDaniel, Meleko Mokgosi, Martine Syms, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Kay WalkingStick, Wilmer Wilson IV, and many others. The BMA is committed to telling stories that reflect the true spectrum and diversity of voices and experiences in our world. The reinstallation of the contemporary wing speaks to the museum’s commitment to sharing narratives that expand the art historical canon. As this story is continually evolving, nearly half of the works will change every six months during the two-year presentation.
Figurative paintings by three Americans reflect the shifting social and sexual mores of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in this wonderful show, whose title is borrowed from a 1962 essay by Dore Ashton.
