Goldsleger’s mixed media paintings and drawings juxtapose the fluid topography of maps, the poetry of lines in space and the geometry of analytical systems. They embrace the real and the imagined while attempting to address aspects of how society is organized. Over the years different generational and cultural attitudes toward space have been important factors in Goldsleger's work, challenging the artist to understand diverse points of view and varied, often contradictory, cultural needs. Although never specific to a place or a source, her study of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and accurate 19th and early 20th century maps, which are visually compelling and historically provocative, form the underlying framework for Goldsleger's paintings.
Both her paintings and drawings develop in layers through a process of accrued mark making that must then be selectively removed to reveal the lines and forms previously made. The initial composition becomes submerged during the process as she continues to add marks atop the earlier framework. Many more layers, additions, subtractions and revisions eventually allow the final image to materialize. In some way it is analogous to the mysterious, now rarely used, process of watching a carefully composed photograph emerge on a blank piece of photo paper when it is placed in a bath of developer.
Working with structural imagery throughout her career, Goldsleger was invited to research in the NAS archive and then created a body of work based on the architecture of the historic National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C. The completed works were exhibited there in spring 2013 in a solo exhibition entitled The NAS Project. The project features six canvases, a sculpture, and six computer animations.
Cheryl Goldsleger was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received her BFA from Philadelphia College of Art. While there she attended a summer semester at Tyler’s School of Art in Rome, Italy, and later received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Actively exhibiting her work since the early 1980’s, Goldsleger had her first important solo exhibitions with Heath Gallery in Atlanta, GA in 1980 and with Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York City in 1981. Since then she has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad and is well represented in important museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Brooklyn Museum; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; The Fogg Museum; the High Museum; the Israel Museum; the New Orleans Museum; the North Carolina Museum of Art; Arkansas Art Center; Yale University Art Gallery; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; and the Tel Aviv Museum among many other important public and private collections.
She has received artist grants from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded residencies at the La Napoule Foundation in southern France and an US/France exchange fellowship at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. There are numerous catalogues and publications including her work, and she has been well-reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, The Hudson Review, The New York Observer, ArtNet Magazine and Art Papers to name just a few.
Other recent exhibitions include Close Readings: American Abstract Art at Vanderbilt University’s Fine Art Gallery in Nashville, TN; Line of Site, a two-person exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, MD; a solo exhibition at Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta; Heated Exchange, a traveling group exhibition on view at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA and California State University, Carson, CA, and Vast Scale-Intimate Space, hosted by the European Cultural Center for the 58th Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, in 2019.
A major public project by Goldsleger is the permanent, large-scale mosaic tile floor installation entitled Crossroads for the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.