Emily Berger: Chorus
I approach my paintings like writing or music, making deliberate but improvisatory marks, with rests and breaks along the way. My hand stops and stutters, creating a variety of marks, pulses and intervals, in a mix of rhythms, texture, color and light. The wood panels I paint on provide a warm and tactile ground on which to begin. I choose scale, color, and brushes, painting with oil in a primarily horizontal motion, layering, revising and reconsidering as I go. I select the colors and structure of the work, but with each layer, the unpredictable emerges. My intuitive response to these changes guides the painting’s evolution. Variation and surprise, freedom within the structure of repetitive movement and mark making are the key elements of my work; they work as a way to combine and resolve the analytical and the emotional, the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and irrational. Within the limitations of the rectangle there is infinite room.
About the Artist
Emily Berger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Brown University, she received an MFA in painting from Columbia University, attended the Skowhegan School in Maine and has been awarded several residency fellowships, including from Millay Arts. Her work has been exhibited widely and reviewed in numerous publications such as The Hudson Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, and The Boston Globe. She is included in many private and public collections.
Berger has been presented in solo exhibitions at Scholes Street Studio, Walter Wickiser Gallery, Norte Maar, and The Painting Center, all in New York City. Recent exhibitions also include On Balance, curated by Mary Birmingham at Art Cake, Sight/Unseen, curated by Hanne Tierney, SONIC at Metaphor Gallery, Form and Intent at Abstract Project in Paris, Syncopation, at Odetta Gallery, Salon Zurcher, 11 Women of Spirit, at Zurcher Gallery, and Side to Side, Three Ways at Key Projects. Berger is included in the traveling exhibition, Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936-Present, currently on view at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn.
About the Exhibition
On view September 12 – December 8, 2023
To see the exhibition, email Events@TenBerke.com
