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Bergstein's work contrasts the awesome and the trivial, the high and the low, the manic and the melancholic using sources from Brueghel to "The Simpsons." He is the recipient of an Artadia grant (2007), a career achievement award from the St. Botolph Club (2007), and a four-week residency at the Liguria Study Center in Genoa, Italy (2006). His solo shows include Gallery NAGA and the Danforth Museum (scheduled for 11/09); Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston ('04, '02, '99, '97); Stephan Stux Gallery, NY ('99); Galerie Bonnier, Geneva, Switzerland; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL; and the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. He is represented in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MIT; DeCordova Museum; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; IBM; and many others. He has been reviewed widely in the local press as well as Tema Celeste, ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. He has been on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for over two decades.
Bergstein will have 20-year survey, "Gerry Bergstein: Effort at Speech," at the Danforth Museum of Art November 21, 2009-February 28, 2010.
Artist Statement
"Whatever it is I'm against it"- Groucho Marx
"All you need is love"- The Beatles
What can the juxtapositions of images of Gerome's "Pygmalion and Galetea," Magritte's "Kiss," Renoir's and Beckmanns's dancers, and Currin's couple making pasta tell us about love and art? How can the image juxtaposition of a rear view bather in a harem by Ingres and a rear view painting of Leigh Bowery by Lucian Freud be, almost magically, so formally similar. My work samples art history and hypothesizes "chance meetings" of images which have everything and nothing in common. It generates blind dates between images and ideologies from art of the past several hundred years. I love the auras that images project onto each other. I am interested in this because I believe visual ideologies are virtual stand-ins for political ideologies which result in real rather than virtual wars. I am fascinated that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney might be distant relatives and that Hitler, Stalin, and Freud lived within a few miles of each other in early 20th-century Vienna-or that Hitler, Churchill, and Eisenhower were all amateur landscape painters. I'm fascinated by near misses and strange connections which in my art form virtual alternative universes.
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Regular Full Time Faculty
Disciplines Taught:
Painting
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