{"id":23838,"date":"2023-09-20T23:55:29","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T03:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=23838"},"modified":"2023-09-20T23:55:29","modified_gmt":"2023-09-21T03:55:29","slug":"gerry-bergstein-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2023\/09\/20\/gerry-bergstein-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Gerry Bergstein Paints A World Full Of Dire Emergencies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cGerry Bergstein: Dithering Machines\u201d<\/em> at Boston\u2019s Gallery Naga<\/a> from September 5 to 30, 2023, can give the feeling of peeking in a Renaissance master\u2019s sketchbook imaginings of the end of the world. The paintings seem to depict ruins, a leaning tower with mushrooming growths, people peering at what looks like a crashed space station, the dim ruins of the Tower of Babel as painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the 1560s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe works in this show are absurdist twists on Breugel\u2019s \u2018Tower of Babel\u2019 and Piranesi\u2019s destroyed architecture rotting into the landscape,\u201d Bergstein writes. Babel is a fable about people going too far, building a city and tower reaching up into the heavens, and God scattering them and muddling their languages so they could no longer understand each other. For Bergstein, it becomes a metaphor for the recklessness of our times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paintings, Bergstein adds, \u201cThey are also homages to art and artists I\u2019ve loved from 1960 until now.  To list a few- Leonardo\u2019s late disaster drawings, Arshile Gorky\u2019s erotic biomorphism, sci-fi illustrations of landscape as body, the poetic abysses of Lee Bontecou\u2019s early sculpture, Saul Steinberg\u2019s hilarious paradoxes, Jean Tinguely\u2019s giant self-destroying machines, Nicole Eisenman\u2019s virtuosic tragi-comic humanism cartoon graffiti, Wangechi Mutu\u2019s extraordinary collages, and Thornton Dial\u2019s great assemblages, and of course Philip Guston.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A gallery walk-through with Bergstein will take place on Saturday, Sept. 23 at 2 pm.  No RSVP required. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\u201cGerry
\u201cGerry Bergstein: Dithering Machines\u201d at Boston\u2019s Gallery Naga, 2023. (Courtesy of Gallery NAGA and the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Cambridge artist has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts since 1982, where he received his BFA in 1969 and MFA in 1971. His paintings can feel as if he\u2019s trying to piece worlds back together from shards of the ruins, or at least piles of magazine clippings, or of all the thoughts and anxieties racing through his mind. Over the years, he\u2019s painted anatomical hearts on barren planets and skies swarming with airplanes, sandwiches, spoons, pancakes, paintbrushes, knives. He\u2019s painted bouquets of flowers and bits of art history (Matisse women, Lucien Freud self-portraits, Van Gogh postman, Renoir and Beckman couples dancing, Hopper weary figures, John Currin). He\u2019s made trompe-l\u2019oeil paintings resembling pasted together maps. He\u2019s painted howling, clowning self-portraits (a 2001 painting was titled \u201cScreams Throughout Art History\u201d). Sometimes it seems as if he\u2019s discovering the cosmos in the paint-splattered studio floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn Bergstein’s wry, neurotic, and celebratory trompe l’oeil mixed-media paintings, art is a metaphor for life, messy and fecund; the studio is a site for creation and, with its layers of encrusted paint and history, excavation,\u201d Cate McQuaid has written in The Boston Globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Gerry
Gerry Bergstein, “Attempted Mind Meld with Philip Guston,” 2023, mixed media on paper, 24 x 40 in (Courtesy of Gallery NAGA and the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Bergstein writes of the paintings in the new exhibition, \u201cI want the works to appear to be fragments of partly destroyed ancient documents reassembled by incompetent restorers. \u00a0Or perhaps they are documents of our time reassembled by future generations.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in the provisional, the contingent, the accidental as well as the planned. \u00a0I\u2019m an accident-prone control freak.\u00a0 I want to reflect my studio practice in which I often spend hours looking for things I\u2019ve misplaced only to find them useless when I find them.\u00a0 The trial-and-error process often means the work takes a couple of years to complete. \u00a0\u00a0There is an awful lot of dithering going on here both in my life and the world. \u00a0Why all this complication? \u00a0What are the little men in a few of the pictures trying to do? \u00a0Perhaps trying to save a world they\u2019re destroying.\u00a0 Even though the world is full of dire emergencies, many people, including me, live our lives as though things are normal.\u00a0 But what is \u201cnormalcy\u201d in an age of ecological disaster, extreme sexism and racism, plagues, and war?\u00a0 We dither along as best we can.\u00a0 It has always been thus.\u00a0 Human culture is a beautiful miracle, and a suicidal and homicidal disaster. \u00a0But I am not a pessimist.\u00a0 To paraphrase Thomas Hardy\u2019s poem \u2018Hap,\u2019 my world is accidentally strewn pains and blisses. \u00a0I hope the work shows not only bleakness but the love, delight, and humor I experience while making it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2023 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"\u201cGerry
\u201cGerry Bergstein: Dithering Machines\u201d at Boston\u2019s Gallery Naga, 2023. (Courtesy of Gallery NAGA and the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Gerry
Gerry Bergstein, “Dithering Machine,”2023\nmixed media on canvas, 83 x 107.5 in (Courtesy of Gallery NAGA and the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\u201cGerry
\u201cGerry Bergstein: Dithering Machines\u201d at Boston\u2019s Gallery Naga, 2023. (Courtesy of Gallery NAGA and the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGerry Bergstein: Dithering Machines\u201d at Boston\u2019s Gallery Naga from September 5 to 30, 2023, can give the feeling of peeking in a Renaissance master\u2019s sketchbook imaginings of the end of the world. The paintings seem to depict ruins, a leaning tower with mushrooming growths, people peering at what looks like a crashed space station, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23885,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[1174,984,1173],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23838"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23838"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23895,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23838\/revisions\/23895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}