Gerson Leiber: The Poetry of Geometry and Color

Gerson Leiber: The Poetry of Geometry and Color

1992 – 2002 Abstractions

Reception Saturday, October 18, 1 – 4 pm

The Leiber Collection is pleased to present Gerson Leiber: The Poetry of Geometry and Color, an exhibition celebrating a dynamic decade in the career of artist Gerson Leiber. This focused presentation brings together works that reflect Leiber’s immersion in abstraction and his dialogue with modernist movements that fused emotion, geometry, and color into poetic visual form.

Leiber’s paintings from this period reveal a rhythmic sensibility—an intuitive orchestration of color, movement, and balance. Circles, arcs, and curvilinear planes merge and dissolve, suggesting both the rigor of design and the fluidity of emotion. The resulting compositions convey a sense of motion suspended in time, where geometry becomes poetry and color becomes sound.

His sweeping arcs and interlocking circles recall the vibrant and powerful work of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, while his gently shifting, colorful blocks and planes further reveal a kinship with Orphism. This early 20th-century movement led by the Delaunays transformed Cubism’s geometry into lyrical, color-driven abstraction inspired by the rhythms of music. In Gerson’s paintings, color serves as both subject and structure: vibrant fields of crimson, cobalt, and ochre pulse with energy, carrying the eye—and the imagination—beyond the edges of the canvas.

Paintings such as Red Square (1999) and Snow in March (2002) demonstrate Leiber’s sensitivity to the architecture of space and the pulse of color. These works embody an energy that is at once lyrical and constructed—a painter’s meditation on rhythm, symmetry, and sensation. Through geometric layering and a confident command of color, Leiber achieves a visual music that feels timeless and deeply personal.

Although sometimes referencing the figurative and landscape traditions that characterized much of his earlier work, as seen in Portrait of Bill King (2001) and Untitled (2002), an abstracted cityscape, these compositions show an artist freed by form—one who distilled decades of technical skill into a vibrant language of motion and balance. Each canvas becomes a space for reflection, celebrating the expressive power of paint itself.

A painter, printmaker, and sculptor of extraordinary range, Leiber exhibited widely throughout his career, with works represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington DC, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, and others. Together with his wife, the celebrated handbag designer Judith Leiber, he forged one of the most remarkable artistic partnerships of the 20th century—two visionaries whose shared dedication to craft and beauty continues to inspire.

Gerson Leiber: The Poetry of Geometry and Color invites visitors to celebrate a modernist whose paintings radiate both discipline and delight—works that continue to resonate with a bold, optimistic spirit of abstraction.

On view at The Leiber Collection

The Leiber Collection is located at 446 Old Stone Highway in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs. Open Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays from 1–4 pm or other times by appointment.

For more information, please visit www.leibercollection.org, email [email protected], or call 631-329-3288.

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