Upon walking into the gallery you are presented with two groups of drawings and a corpus of paintings done on overlapping perforated sheet metal. The exhibition, loosely titled Sugar von Frankenstein takes it's cue from the patch work of drawings and paintings sewn together to tell us a story of sorts. The title phrase appears in one series of drawings, but unlike Mary Shelly's creature, Berkenblit's creations have a sweeter, softer personification. A female protagonist, pert, pug-nosed and neurotically bug-eyed, pops in and out of the scenes. The drawings and paintings depict a soft and fuzzy supporting cast of characters all drawn into life under a bold graphic line. There is a saccharin sweetness introduced by cute birds, snakes, tigers and bears (oh my!) which counters the aggressive mark making surrounding and in some cases obliterating the figures.
The artist's drawing has a goofy authenticity that is so rare today and contrasts the flood of too cool graphic design ever present in our periphery. Like her peers Amy Sillman and the late Margaret Kilgallen, Berkenblit has been using a rough hewn narrative drawing style to refine her own unique visual vocabulary. One which relies on a more intimate, almost embarrassing storyline that innocently draws the viewer in. That whispering intimacy seems to go on deaf ears in this new painting format. Mind you the work is quite stunning with wonderful merging color painted and sprayed on a perforated surface of overlapping grids. Unlike the drawings, these paintings rely less on the figure by letting the merging color and form coalesce to the edge of abstraction. In some of the paintings like Sir Peacock and the Falcon the imagery has merged into a wonderful jumble of layered color and shape. However, in most of the paintings the impact of the artists hand is diminished by the competing perforated ground. While the novelty of the perforations is intriguing and they edge a pop abstraction into a familiar graffiti street aesthetic the power of the artist's intimate line and narrative diminishes slightly. Over all this show is not to be missed and I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.
Exhibition Information
September 6 thru October 4, 2003
Anton Kern Gallery
532 West 20th Street
New York NY 10011
Review written for the Gay
City News, New York City
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This review also appears online at Art For Real.
Lionel's Happy Ending, 2003
Spray paint and enamel on mesh metal, 62x98 inches
Swampling, 2003
Spray paint and enamel on mesh metal, 50x73 inches
Sir Peacock and the Falcon, 2003
Spray paint and enamel on mesh metal, 51x100 inches
Exhibition view:
(Left) Traffic
(Right) A Day on Blueberry Street, 2003
Spray paint and enamel on mesh metal, 66x87 inches
Traffic, 2003
Spray paint and enamel on mesh metal, 50x33 inches
Selected drawings from the exhibition.
untitled, 2002-2003, Ink, graphite, watercolor on paper, all under 12x9 inches
Photos taken by Andrew Robinson with the permission of the Anton Kern Gallery.
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