Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took Amtrak down to Philadelphia and arrived there in 90 minutes, about the same amount of time it takes to go from Coney Island to MoMA by subway. I was celebrating my last few days of Spring Break, my terminal lust for abstraction, and the lifelong friendship with two artists, Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg, exhibiting together at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in a show titled “between earth and sky.”
I love a two- and three-person show, especially if it involves reductive artists, because it strikes up an immediate dialogue. There are many artists in this world. Rather than expecting one to do everything, it makes sense simply to invite another to the party. Fineman and Greenberg have been in conversation for some time. Their dialogue is collegial, contrasting, and complementary. This show is also a natural, classical pairing between a painter and a sculptor. Greenberg is mostly engaged with weight, density, and displacement, Fineman with atmosphere. Fineman’s work is single-plane, Greenberg’s multi-plane. They’re both organic abstractionists, preoccupied with the quiet poetics of material color. There’s not much here that relies on theatrical presentation.
Greenberg’s Pinkbeam Propped has the mild precarity of a simple prop trap that kids once made to catch rabbits, birds, or turtles. Those traps seldom worked – mine never did – but the piece does, its ankle-high elevation and low center of gravity somewhat reminiscent of Richard Nonas’ floor-bound sculptures.
Bugs Bunny in a rabbit trap, and a Richard Nonas untitled iron sculpture from 1982
Fineman’s abstractions don’t look like nature, but his lilting brushwork, though skeletal, does feel like nature. It’s a bit magical, and testament to his sensitivity, that a repeated quavering line or an image of crosshatched static interference can be so evocatively oceanic.
There’s considerable common ground between Fineman and Greenberg. Fineman’s color tends to run within the long range of blue, from ultramarine to cerulean, the latter often chimerical and reading as blue, green, or even gray. Greenberg uses blue too, but his version is pinker and earthier, more like slate and stone. Greenberg is a kind of crypto-painter. His installations often consist of a plane placed in front of a plane and so on, rendering them as close to painting as sculpture. He also frequently paints plaster, adjusting the colored surfaces of his objects as a painter does. While trafficking in the prop minimalism of Richard Serra, he’s angling for something like the contractor sensibility of Russell Maltz’s aggregated stacks. The wooden supports of Fineman’s paintings have a similar affect. Greenberg’s placements are provisional and mildly threatening. Pondering his slanting planes, I couldn’t help thinking of Robert Mitchum’s stealthy menace in The Night of the Hunter, singing “Leaning … Leaning … Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
Here are two mature artists at the top of their game. How did they get here? It took decades of open inquiry and deep commitment to materials and vision to become so meaningfully minimal.
“Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg: between earth and sky,” Larry Becker Contemporary Art, 43 N. 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA. Through May 23, 2026.
About the author: Michael Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who writes on art.
