Gerry Bergstein
“Whatever it is I’m against it”- Groucho Marx
“All you need is love”- The Beatles What can the juxtapositions of images of Gerome’s Pygmalion and Galetea, Magritte’s Kiss, Renoir’s and Beckmanns’s dancers and Currin’s couple making pasta tell us about love and art? How can the image juxtaposition of a rear view bather in a harem by Ingres and a rear view painting of Leigh Bowery by Lucian Freud, almost magically, be so formally similar? This work samples art history and hypothesizes “chance meetings” of images which have everything and nothing in common. It generates blind dates between images and ideologies from art of the past several hundred years. I love the auras that images project onto each other. I am interested in this because I believe visual ideologies are virtual stand ins for the political and moral ideologies which result in real rather than virtual battles. I am fascinated that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are distant cousins and that Hitler, Stalin and Freud lived within a few miles of each other in early 20th century Vienna- or that Hitler, Churchill and Eisenhower were all amateur landscape painters. I’m fascinated by nears misses and strange connections which in my art form virtual alternative universes.
“All you need is love”- The Beatles What can the juxtapositions of images of Gerome’s Pygmalion and Galetea, Magritte’s Kiss, Renoir’s and Beckmanns’s dancers and Currin’s couple making pasta tell us about love and art? How can the image juxtaposition of a rear view bather in a harem by Ingres and a rear view painting of Leigh Bowery by Lucian Freud, almost magically, be so formally similar? This work samples art history and hypothesizes “chance meetings” of images which have everything and nothing in common. It generates blind dates between images and ideologies from art of the past several hundred years. I love the auras that images project onto each other. I am interested in this because I believe visual ideologies are virtual stand ins for the political and moral ideologies which result in real rather than virtual battles. I am fascinated that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are distant cousins and that Hitler, Stalin and Freud lived within a few miles of each other in early 20th century Vienna- or that Hitler, Churchill and Eisenhower were all amateur landscape painters. I’m fascinated by nears misses and strange connections which in my art form virtual alternative universes.
