Emily Berger

Exhibition Dates: May 19, 2008 - June 13, 2008

Reception: Thursday, May 22, 6 - 8 PM

The Painting Center is pleased to present an exhibition of abstract paintings and works on paper by Emily Berger in the Main Gallery. In these layered works, painterly grids are both formed and disrupted by color, gesture, and sometimes a looping line that introduces organic form to vertical and horizontal structures.

This geometry may allude to an urban landscape, but it is to a landscape that moves and changes with light and shadow, intense color, and glimmers of nature and figuration. Shape, line and color jostle one another within the grid, actual or implied, and bump up against the edges of the support, animating the surface and creating a partially illuminated depth. The emotive power of the work resides in its dynamic line and color, in the spontaneity and deliberation of the process of its making and the resulting tension between stability and instability, humor and mystery, the rational and irrational, the hidden and revealed.

Emily Berger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Brown University, she received a MFA from Columbia and attended the Skowhegan School. She has been a resident at the Millay Art Colony, among others. She is a member of American Abstract Artists and curated the exhibit “Nature Abstracted” at The Painting Center. She also takes photographs, and considers her black and white photographs as source material for painting and drawing as well as works in their own right. Her work has been included in exhibits in the Northeast and in New York, most recently at the Metaphor and Sideshow Galleries, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, Colombia. She is participating in The National Academy Museum’s Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art on view concurrently with this show.