Emily Berger Exhibition

Norte Maar

[Image: Emily Berger "Dressmaker" (2016) Oil on wood, 48 x 36 in.]

This event has ended.

Emily Berger’s paintings have been recognized for their meditative and pensive mark - a brush stroke starting left and moving to the right. It is a deliberate and repetitive gesture and one the artist continues to explore year after year.

In the new paintings by the artist we see again the consistency of the mark, and yet in some the gesture has become syncopated—become punctuated with deliberate pulsations of dense pigment, places where the eye pauses or rests. I’d like to think that this is an attempt by the artist to introduce a narrative—a story with stops and explanations, beginnings and endings. The new paintings balance space completely, just as they have in the past, but there is a focused effort on an emotion. Dense marks vs light ones. Direct marks vs subtle ones.

From Jackson Pollock to Helen Frankenthaler to Morris Louis, the significance of the mark has all but come to define the momentum of Post-War American art. It’s what Clement Greenberg called pictorial meter. Berger’s paintings, like Louis’ Veils, create the effect of a screened, mysterious presence. And her decision to allow the natural grain of her wood panels to remain integral to her work gives over completely with Post-War’s passion for the unprimed canvas. Her repetitive dragging corresponds to Monet’s scumbling, as the directed quality of the painted layers “combines with the ethereal tonalities to produce a poetic atmosphere,” as Bill Rubin once said of Pollock.

The meditative and the sublime ride close in definition and both are accurate when describing Berger’s work. But I’ve always been drawn to her paintings for their grace and energy, finding them epic and full of emotion whether they be darkly haunting or simply the celebration of sunlight.

-Jason Andrew, Brooklyn, October 2017