Shirley Gorelick exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum

Curator: Christine McCarthy

Opening Reception Date: Friday, June 27, 2025 - 6:00pm

Provincetown Art Association and Museum
460 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
 

This Director’s Choice exhibition will highlight the work of American artist Shirley Gorelick (1924-2000), with particular attention paid to her connections to the Hans Hofmann school in Provincetown.

Shirley Gorelick (1924–2000) was an American artist who evolved a distinctive realist technique that allowed her to create penetrating psychological portraiture, often on a large scale. She described her early work as a contemporary reinterpretation of the figure “within the framework of a personal humanism” and her later work as “psychological portraiture.” She earned her B.A. at Brooklyn College (1944), where she studied under Serge Chermayeff, and her M.A. at Teachers College, Columbia University (1947). She briefly studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown and Betty Holliday in Port Washington. Her early work was influenced by Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism, but she became uncomfortable with the distortion of the human figure in modern art.