The Brooklyn Rail

Upon entering the brightly lit Ronald Feldman Gallery, I first thought with some dismay that I had come to see Unseen Layers, a show of Edwin Schlossberg’s recent works, on a day when the exhibition was being photographed. There were clamp lights mounted on tall stands, like those for a photo shoot—one spotlight focused on each of the fifteen painted panels hung along the walls. I soon learned that the lamps were part of the installation and that each was intended to enhance the highly reflective material that Schlossberg used for these colorful, ostensibly abstract paintings on aluminum panels. This retroreflective material, 3M Scotchlite, constitutes a pigment made with tiny beads or micro-prisms that reflect light directly back to the source and is typically used for industrial purposes such as roadway signage. The opalescent quality of the surfaces causes Schlossberg’s colors to shift in tone and intensity as one moves before the panels, each identical in size (36 by 60 inches) and hung horizontally, except for one work hung vertically in a rear office space.

A veteran New York-based artist and designer who holds doctorate degrees from Columbia University in both physics and English and American literature, Schlossberg has been on the avant-garde art scene since the late 1960s. His early, mostly black-and-white film, Making Visible (1969), is also included here, playing on a video monitor in one of the gallery’s street-level windows. Addressing theories of image-making and the phenomenology of light, and with a commentary by Buckminster Fuller and a cameo appearance by Andy Warhol, the film corresponds to Schlossberg’s more recent interest in scientific approaches to art and creativity. Today, Schlossberg is probably best known for text-driven artworks characterized by stenciled lettering and poignant themes centered on the environment and socio-political issues, with aims that are more poetic than didactic. The recent works in Unseen Layers, all created over the past three years, propose a dramatic departure for the artist. They appear as wholly abstract compositions minus any textual intervention except for the titles of the works, which are etched onto small metal plates attached to the wall just below each painting.

With their colorful, irregular patterns of lines, orbs, and myriad organic shapes, the works correspond on a formal level to the long tradition of lyrical abstraction, as well as to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Portrait of a Retina (2023), for example, features an allover pattern of vertically arranged, elongated diamond shapes in green and orange, intertwined with a meandering web of gold lines that seem to quiver against a dark background of greens and blues. In an interview, Schlossberg revealed that some works—Portrait of an Atom and Portrait of Glial Cell (both 2023), for instance, with their repeated patterns of orange and gold circular forms—were inspired in part by his study of Aboriginal painting undertaken when his wife, Caroline Kennedy, served as US Ambassador to Australia (2022–24).

In Unseen Layers, Schlossberg explores a similarly personalized cosmology by means of symbolic rather than written language, in terms of repeated multilayered, rhythmic patterns of geometric shapes, fluid lines, and brilliant color. Titles such as Portrait of Bacteria (2023) and Portrait of a Stem Cell (2025) indicate specific representational subject matter. The images suggest minute life forms examined under a microscope and allude to the artist’s lifelong interest in scientific research. In contrast to the microcosmic realm that pervades the exhibition, Portrait of the Sun Shining (2023) is the only work on view that hints at a macrocosmic application for the artist’s latest endeavor. Adding the word “Portrait” to the titles affords him a great deal of artistic license to diverge from conventional scientific representations of his subjects. By obliging the audience to amble among the tall light stands to examine the works, he also invites viewers to participate in his idiosyncratic, quasi-scientific investigation.