Gallery - Time and Space Limited

UPCOMING EXHIBITS:
>>>>>>>>

John Lawson
10/11/25

Nancy Shaver with
Maximilian Goldfarb and George Liu 11/15/25

IN THE TSL GALLERY
EVERYTHING’S PERSONAL
BY MYRON POLENBERG

On view September 6th though October 5, 2025

Gallery Open Daily 12–5 PM

EVERYTHING’S PERSONAL by Myron Polenberg

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Everything’s personal.
I came into a world at war. A world fighting against Hitler and Fascism. I assumed, and then hoped, that when it’s time for me to leave the world it would a better place than when I arrived. I’m probably not alone in thinking, at this moment in time, that might not happen. Things look bad. Things have looked bad before. And then they have gotten better … Jackie Robinson, JFK, MLK, Obama.

When I look at a work of art I want to feel something. An intellectual way of putting that is,“Do I feel the artist has shared themself with me?” When looking at my work or another artist’s I’m not analyzing the individual parts, I’m seeing the whole piece. I’m experiencing my reaction to the work. Your reaction will be different from mine. But if you react, even feeling that the work isn’t worthwhile, then we are experiencing something together.

Black. Why black? I wanted to take away my dominant tool: color. I wanted to see what kind of power I could create by tightening the discipline. In the work, black isn’t the focal point. The white coming through is what matters. Seeing the positive of what you perceive to be negative. While working, I discovered that painting the black also lets me paint out the noise. I’m painting out the sound that’s in my head. With quiet repetition I finally find what I’m trying to express. I realized that what I created, in spite of myself, was a painting that is about the light coming through. Sometimes I have to live with a piece for a long time before it gives me a hint as to what it might be about. When I have a breakthrough and discover the work – that breakthrough is what matters.

What you see here are touchstones of my life. Everything’s personal.

Myron Polenberg
American 1940

Myron Polenberg. Photo David McIntyre.

Totems, 2025
Various sizes, 12”–50”x 6”, Wood, twine, paint.
Photo David McIntyre.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Over the course of a 50+ year career as a Fine Artist and Designer, Myron Polenberg has created a significant body of work that addresses important issues of our time and uses a variety of mediums including paint, sculpture, assemblage, mixed media, installation and film, among others. Regardless of the medium, Polenberg’s work retains as its core a concern with information; in particular, the gap between the remains of information and the information that remains; information as artifact; questions about impermanence and the manner in which information is processed, obscured, revealed and destroyed. All of this is done in the context of a historical continuum that coincides with the events, histories and social narratives that Polenberg has been witness to in his lifetime. Themes that emerge time and again in Polenberg’s work include justice, inequality, power, war, gender and sexuality. Such are the concepts that continue to remind us of our own humanity, and historically, the incidences that cause us to question it altogether.

Polenberg’s lengthy career in advertising Design was also consumed by the conveyance of information, including designing the first line of Swiss Army watches by the brand. Where Polenberg’s Design career was preoccupied with a very direct manner of information transmission for the consumer market, his Fine Art often ruminates, sometimes remaining intentionally elusive, preferring suggestion to statement; other times relying on provocation to compel a response. In every case, Polenberg is reacting to or against personal experiences from a lifetime lived in the midst of historic cultural shifts and dramatic social change.