October 9th – November 8th 2009
Opening Reception: October 9th  6:30-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: October 16th, 8pm - RSVP required

Like the Spice is pleased to present Dean Goelz: Beaded
Curtain, an exhibition of the artist’s astoundingly magical
works on paper and panel. Composed of fractal accretions
of meticulously placed shiny white dots and tightly rendered
faces and hands, the figures in Goelz’s works seem to
manifest themselves face first from nothingness. Not quite
delimited, more atmospheric than solid, these apparitions are
between two worlds, present yet translucent.

Despite their delicate limbo, each figure is endowed with a
strikingly detailed specificity. You can read the history of the
characters between the fine lines of their faces and see the
individual particularities of their dance-like gestures. These
figures are very much a product of time. They exist in nothingness but came from a more solid
world. This focus, however, does not mark the works as portraits; they are actually more
archetypical and emotional than they are illustrative. Each character seems at once to be an
individual and an everyman or everywoman.

Alone amid the void of unmarked backgrounds, each figure is left to struggle with their place.
Orienting in nothingness leaves no choice but to look inward, living an ascetic silence. This
stillness is reflected in the artist’s meditative approach to his gruelingly controlled and repetitive
process. The time taken to complete each work requires a patience and love like that of a
longtime relationship, committed, complex and mundanely miraculous. The web-like networks
of dots, slowly unfurling over time, mark the hours of a life lived in art.

Dean Goelz graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. His work has shown
nationally and internationally and is included in private collections in the US, France, and the
Czech Republic. He lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This will be Dean Goelz’s second
solo show at Like the Spice.