Robert Gordy’s death in 1986 at the age of 52 was an enormous loss. Gordy possessed extraordinary compositional skills and a marvelously imaginative intelligence. His elegant paintings done in his signature style through 1981 evidence a mastery, particularly over hue and value of color and keeping dynamics of shape in varied balance. Even in this austere period there were often intense emotional realities beneath his paintings’ apparent calm. Beginning in 1982 his work was clearly about more than mastery of color and design as profound emotional messages surfaced in Robert Gordy’s superb series of monotypes done at the end of his life.