About the artist:

Maurice Golubov began to paint abstract paintings in 1922, at the age of 17, he was oblivious to the fact that anyone else was doing the same thing elsewhere. For the first twelve years of his life, Maurice Golubov existed in a state of disbelief. He heard firsthand, the horror stories of his father being kidnapped as a child and sent to a czarist camp for eight years; In 1915, as a band of refugees, he accompanied his mother and his siblings through eastern Europe, taking flight from the atrocities which abounded with the onset of World War I; and he painfully experienced traumatic months when he was unwillingly separated from his family during their plight to the U.S in 1917. Given this understanding of early childhood trauma it is not surprising that Golubov would later use painting as a forum which with to reconcile his thoughts on the spiritual and transcendental in life. For him the nature of visual experience demanded that there exist an expression of shapes and colors that corresponded to his notions of ideal form - form that lies just beyond our visual grasp of the world around us, yet which seems to correspond to our feelings of and about that world. Even today the fact that his doing so may well have predated the influence of Mondrian and European non-objectivism on our acclaimed geometric painters - something that must be left for more precise historians to ascertain - is of remarkably little importance to him. Similarly, he is both amused and puzzled by the long-accepted belif that the development of abstracction pre-empts the credibility of a simultaneous figurative art, for he is a painter who has always found it necessary to work in both modes at once, and believes he is all the better for it as an artist. Like Cezanne, Kandinsky and Mondrian, Golubov felt that art was a spiritual undertaking. Therefore, while formally the “fourth dimension” represented a certain freedom of the fixed planar elements from the canvas’ space, it also suggested a realm beyond the physical, that of infinite possibility. Throughout his entire oeuvre Golubov painted both figurative and abstract compositions. His figurative works represent “the metaphysical figure”, displaying a dignity that transcends the ordinary. For this reason his figures appear many times in frieze-like arrangements, a traditional form of representing the rich and powerful. Although his oeuvre contains no thematic progression, in the likes of a true genius, his earliest compositions and latest compositions differ only in the intensity of their details and colors, not in their original concept.