Summary

Throughout his work, Bay Area painter Sheldon Greenberg employs a repertoire of images that delve into his exploration of personal memories, popular culture, classic cinema, and modern architecture. Greenberg’s painted scenes straddle the divide between reality and fiction, public and private.

Greenberg toys like a Pop artist with conventions of 20th-century representation and abstraction. Among the artists that readily come to mind are Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha. Even the Op-artist Bridget Riley’s systematic abstraction can be seen nudging itself into various compositions. Greenberg may be thinking about the evolution of these once revolutionary Modernist’s styles into kitsch–and in that respect he is updating all of these great artists; but like them, he also revels in painting as an end to itself.