For nearly four decades, Joseph Goldberg has produced paintings of great intelligence and sumptuous beauty. Raised near Spokane, Washington, he returned to live and work in the open, semi-arid spaces of eastern Washington after building a Seattle reputation as an abstract artist working with geometric shapes in the unusual technique of encaustic painting.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Goldberg's paintings were deceptively simple arrangements of geometric motifs in watercolor on paper or oil on linen. By the mid-1970s, he began to make paintings of a more complex nature,...