Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944–2020) was an American painter whose quietly radical abstractions were deeply informed by the light, textures, and geographies of New York, Miami, and Colombia. Often working in series, she developed layered grid and lattice structures that she stained, scraped, or allowed to bleed through the canvas, creating surfaces that feel at once rigorous and weathered, like woven cloth, rusted metal, or sun-bleached concrete. Her practice grew out of late modernist abstraction, yet she consistently disrupted its “cool” order with references to everyday architecture, indigenous textiles, and the tropical environment.
Gelfman’s process-based approach—pouring, sanding, reversing canvases, and letting paint seep or fade—emphasized time and chance, so that each painting records both deliberate structure and accumulated accident. Long associated with Miami’s art community, she exhibited widely in South Florida and beyond, and her work is held in major public collections, including Pérez Art Museum Miami, where exhibitions have highlighted her sustained engagement with the grid and with place. Through these materially rich, subtly shifting surfaces, Gelfman expanded the language of abstraction to register movement, climate, and cultural memory.