Emily Berger
Artist Statement:
I approach my paintings like writing or music, making deliberate and improvisatory marks with rests and breaks along the way. As I paint, my hand stops and stutters, making a variety of marks, pulses and intervals in a mix of rhythms, texture, and color, creating various kinds of space and light. The wood panels I paint on provide a warm, tactile and patterned ground on which to begin. I choose scale, color, squeegees, brushes and other tools, painting with oil in a primarily horizontal, sometimes vertical motion – layering, revising and reconsidering as I go; a malleable grid provides a loose structure for me. I select the colors and structure of the work, but with each pass, the unpredictable emerges. My intuitive response to these changes guides the painting’s evolution; chance and control are both at play. 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.
Artist Biography:
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. She is a recipient of the John Hultberg Memorial Prize in Painting from The National Academy Museum. Her work has been exhibited widely and reviewed in numerous publications such as The Hudson Review, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, and The Boston Globe and is included in many private and public collections. Solo exhibitions have been presented at Starr Suites, TenBerke Architects, Walter Wickiser Gallery, Norte Maar, Scholes Street Studio, and The Painting Center, all in New York City. Her work also has been included in recent exhibitions at Helm Contemporary, One GAP Gallery, Cedar Crest College and Murray State, Metaphor Gallery, Abstract Project in Paris, Zurcher Gallery, and Key Projects.
AAA:
Member Since: 2006
Vice President: 2013-2018
Committees: Archives (Chair: 2022-24); Exhibitions Chair: 2013-18
Special Projects: Member Interviews, Catalogs Co-Editor
