HAW/CONTEMPORARY ­ PRESS RELEASE
James Brinsfield ­ Self­Titled
Laura Berman ­ Pulsar
April 11 ­ May 24, 2014
Opening Reception ­ Friday, April 11, 5­9 PM
Haw Contemporary presents two solo exhibitions, running from February 28 through April 5. Opening reception with the artists February 28 from 5­9 PM.
James Brinsfield ­ Self­Titled
The paintings in James Brinsfield’s exhibition, Self­Titled, sit in dialogue with the beginnings of abstract expressionism. Brinsfield investigates the emotional, gestural work of painters like Jackson Pollock, fragmenting it and abstracting it even further. “I wanted to invent a new signature ­ one that didn’t mimic the bravura model of the ab­exers, but used their work as a touchstone for a reappraisal of the model of gestural authenticity”. Brinsfield’s simple color combinations, thick daubs of paint applied into wet paint on the canvas, fill and level the surface of the canvas, reflecting a single plane where each color is laid on top of the other ­ a succession of façades. Brinsfield was born in Chicago and lived in Massachusetts and Germany as the son of a career military officer. While in high school in Massachusetts he was awarded a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where he attended drawing classes. Thereafter he moved to Chicago and earned a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA in painting and studied with noted abstract filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Brinsfield has 17 one­person shows in his exhibition history including exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Kansas City. He is the first painter awarded a Charlotte Street Fund Award in 1997. He has been reviewed in Art in America as well as reviews published of his work appearing in Art News, Flash Art, Contemporanea, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and the Kansas City Star. His paintings are in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Daum Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. For the past 16 years he has served as Lecturer in the painting department of the Kansas City Art Institute.
Laura Berman ­ Pulsar
Stars are the inspiration for Laura Berman’s exhibition Pulsar. Directional, magnetic and precise, pulsar stars inform the way we view and measure the universe. These dense stellar remnants are born in supernovas; simultaneously inward­falling and outward­exploding stars. Berman has spent a great deal of time in the Kansas Flint Hills, a vast landscape of nothingness, where the distance between sky and land is short and unmediated. Her new work reflects the connections between these enormous expanses and dense details within a common space.
Berman has created site­specific exhibitions and exhibited her print work at numerous galleries and museums around the country and internationally. Her prints are collected internationally and are published through her own studio in Kansas City, Pele Prints (St. Louis, MO), and Círculo del Arte (Barcelona, Spain). She has been a visiting artist, and has worked as an artist­in­residence at a number of institutions around the world.
Berman is a full professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she has taught in the Printmaking Department since 2002. She received her BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and her MFA from Tulane University. Her work has been featured in The Book of Probes by David Carson / Marshall McLuhan, Printmaking at the Edge by Richard Noyce, and A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking, by Ehlers, Ehlbeck and Muise.
Gallery Hours: 9­5 Tuesday through Friday, 12­5 Saturday
Press Contact
Emily Eddins
816.842.5877
[email protected]