NYAB Event - Michael Berryhill “Something of a Feather”

Michael Berryhill “Something of a Feather”

Kansas

This event has ended.

KANSAS presents Something of a Feather, Michael Berryhill’s third solo show with the gallery.

The paintings of Michael Berryhill exist on their own terms, unequivocal, stark, structured, phosphorescent and protean. Granted, those terms do not come out of nowhere; they are as indebted to the likes of Pierre Bonnard as they are to Henri Matisse or, say, Philip Guston, and then some. The perfectly unselfconscious faith in painting of which they are a byproduct is almost fascinating. It, his faith, seems to issue from some hitherto unknown quarter, as if approached from a totally different angle. It’s like he built his own street to get there (What does this street look like? It is a nice and pleasant street, one that invites pointless lingering, full of green, leafy trees and the motley, pastel shade cast by their foliage). If Berryhill is a painter’s painter, it is because he is participating in a very dense discussion of autonomy, but in his own particular fashion. To the autonomy of paint he cogently adds the autonomy of subject matter. In fact, for him they are patently indivisible. What is mysteriously depicted in his pictures has as much to say about its own formation as his colors seem to be sentient. This is what allows the work to live in a way that makes it feel like it will actually grow, change, evolve. Indeed, like life magnified and teeming under a microscope, it seems to be in a process of perpetual becoming, of efflorescing into what is nevertheless wholly and completely itself. There is the sense in looking at Berryhill’s work that you are always seeing it for the first and last time. Or vice versa. Suddenly it is there. It is not there. It is just around the corner. If not larger, then fuller, more optimistic than you initially expected. Coming to greet you. It comes with a smile. Or maybe not so much a smile, but something just as bright, warm and ultimately elusive. It is going to be a good day, it tells you. It already is. Just look at these paintings.
- Chris Sharp

Michael Berryhill (b. 1972 El Paso, TX) received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA from Columbia University, New York; he attended the acclaimed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Recent exhibitions include Lulu, Mexico City; Fredericks & Freiser, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City; KANSAS, New York; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Blütenweiss Gallery, Berlin; Okay Mountain and Arthouse, Austin; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Bull and Ram, New York; David Castillo, Miami and Participant Inc., New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn.