"You can't attach a label to the work of Sidney Thomas Guberman, although almost everyone--from the severest art critic to the most casual observer--has tried. Carry it a step further. There isn't any specific category into any which you can comfortably fit the artist. Again people try."

"Call Guberman's work abstractionist, or colorist, Call Guberman himself a draftsman or an architectural graduate. You're getting all around the target, but not hitting it." - George Kane, Rocky Mountain News

Sidney describes his work as non-representational in the strictest, most literal sense: “My work is not intended to refer to anything but itself.” He compares his abstractions to Bach’s secular compositions: self-supporting harmonies without historic or personal reference.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina in 1936, Sidney moved to Colorado Springs as a child before attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He credits his mother with encouraging his creativity at an early age.

Sidney received the John Larkin prize for painting at Exeter in 1954, the year he graduated.  He graduated from Princeton in 1958 and earned a Masters in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. After two years with a firm in Philadelphia he left the practice of architecture to paint full-time. While at Princeton, Sidney met the renowned contemporary artist, Frank Stella, then a fellow student and now a lifelong friend whom he describes as his “magnetic north” as a young painter. Sidney is recognized as an authority on Stella’s life and work since authoring Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography (Rizzoli, 1995), begun over the course of a residency at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences in north Georgia.

In 1969 Sidney had his first one-man show at the Owen Gallery in Denver. The following year he moved with his family to Lausanne, Switzerland, where they lived until 1975. During the five years in Lausanne, Sidney taught university level courses in painting, drawing, and color theory and describes the high point of teaching art as “the moment when your student figures out that he can find ‘it’ himself, inside.” His own work continued to evolve over this prolific period, which included seven one-man exhibitions in Switzerland as well as others in Italy, Denmark and Washington, D.C. His work continues to find an audience in Europe, most recently at a one-man show at the Galerie Favre in Nyon, Switzerland in 2007.

Sidney received an individual grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. His work has appeared in more than seventy one-man and group exhibitions internationally. He has taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (1971-73), Ecole Polytechnique Federale (1973-75), Princeton University (1980-81), the University of South Carolina (1990), and the Atlanta College of Art (1990). The many acclaimed exhibitions that he has curated include “Frank Stella – Imaginary Landscapes,” for the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Since 1977 Sidney has lived in Atlanta with his wife Rebecca, who recently retired from the High Museum of Art.