Director’s Choice: Shirley Gorelick in Provincetown

Please join us on Thursday, July 31 for a Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture with PAAM CEO and exhibition curator Christine McCarthy and daughter of the artist, Jamie Gorelick. $15 Museum admission, free for PAAM members.

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.

Image: Shirley Gorelick (1924-2000), Seated Blue Nude, c. 1960, oil on canvas, PAAM Collection, Gift of Jamie S. Gorelick and Steven M. Gorelick, 2014.