NYAB Event - Siri Berg “Color and Space”

Siri Berg “Color and Space”

Hionas Gallery LES

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Hionas Gallery presents Color and Space, a new solo exhibition from master colorist and abstract painter Siri Berg, marking the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. For this show, Berg and gallery owner Peter Hionas are focusing on Berg’s extensive La Ronde and Kabbalah bodies of work, which span more than two decades.

Siri Berg’s career is defined by her continual quests for knowledge, perfection and reinvention, and La Ronde and Kabbalah are ideal case studies for witnessing how such quests have played out on the canvas. Berg’s La Ronde has several derivations, the most prevalent being the rondo form, an often brief musical composition comprised of stylized repetitions and contrasts, with the one constant being that the first and final notes are identical. Around 1967, Berg became inspired to render the rondo into visual form, using contrasting semi-circles of color on square canvases. Berg created spectrums of striking complexity, balancing tones both bright and muted; the canvases interact with each other and become installation art.

For Kabbalah, we fast forward several years to the mid-1980s, when, following nearly a decade of increasing minimalism and reserved color choices in her work, Berg introduced a series of paintings that juxtaposed concentric square formations and subtle color variations. Their precision and symmetry match those of La Ronde, yet when considering Berg’s early catalog of work, Kabbalah emerges as something wholly new, playful, and precisely structured. Working from its namesake’s Sephirot scheme, wherein ten divine emanations are interconnected and represent the attributes which allow God to sustain all life, Berg restructures the Sephirot within her own prescribed order of color, space and form, all while adhering to the rule of ten.

This is the first time La Ronde and Kabbalah are being exhibited together as a distinct pairing. Throughout Siri Berg’s historic career, thematic explorations in her work eventually gave way to a practice grounded firmly in the merits of pure abstraction. And yet to this day, Berg continues to create and seek out the New using those deceptively complex tools of color and space.