Catamount Arts is pleased to showcase the work of Gerry Bergstein in its Fried Family Gallery as part of the exhibition Gerry Bergstein and Gail Boyajian: Uncovered, on view through October 27, 2018. On Saturday, September 22 from 5-7 pm, a wine and cheese reception will be held at Catamount Arts with remarks at 6 pm by artists Gerry Bergstein and Gail Boyajian. All are welcome to attend.
Gerry Bergstein’s paintings excavate the cavernous tomb of art historical knowledge, unearthing sources of creativity buried within the detritus of dried paint and other material piling up on the studio floor. Concerned by threats to the human psyche, his work is a synthesis of themes Bergstein has been dealing with over a decades long career—vanitas and decay, mortality, and the many paradoxes of meaning he uncovers during the act of painting. Delighting in unpredictable relationships set within apocalyptic landscapes, the artist explores the “deepening resonance between process, image, history and style.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gerry Bergstein (Cambridge, MA and Strafford, VT) attended Clark University in Worcester, MA before graduating with from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with a BFA in 1969 and an MFA in 1971. Bergstein’s work contrasts the awesome and the trivial, the high and the low, the manic and the melancholy. “I’m fascinated by nears misses and strange connections” the artist has remarked. He is past recipient of numerous grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, an Artadia Award, a career achievement award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, the Bogliasco Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts and others.
Bergstein has exhibited widely in both galleries and museums, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; the Boston Athenaeum and the Boston Public Library, both Boston, MA; the Danforth Art, Museum/School, Framingham, MA; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MIT, Cambridge, MA, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, as well as numerous corporate collections including the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Fidelity Investments, Polaroid and Wellington Management. Before his retirement in 2017, he was on the painting faculty at the School for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bergstein is currently represented by Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA. For more information on the artist and his work, see https://gerrybergstein.com/.