May 20 - June 14th, 2008

Main Gallery

Emily Berger

Emily Berger Exhibition Information

Project Room

Claire Seidl

Claire Seidl Exhibition Information

Opening Reception for both exhibitions:

Thursday, May 22, 6-8 PM

Please join The Painting Center on Thursday May 22, 2008 for the opening reception for Emily Berger in the Main Gallery and Claire Seidl in the Project Room.

In Emily Berger's layered works, painterly grids are both formed and disrupted by color, gesture, and sometimes a looping line that introduces organic form to vertical and horizontal structures. This geometry may allude to an urban landscape, but it is to a landscape that moves and changes with light and shadow, intense color, and glimmers of nature and figuration. Shape, line and color jostle one another within the grid, actual or implied, and bump up against the edges of the support, animating the surface and creating a partially illuminated depth. The emotive power of the work resides in its dynamic line and color, in the spontaneity and deliberation of the process of its making and the resulting tension between stability and instability, humor and mystery, the rational and irrational, the hidden and revealed.

Emily Berger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Brown University, she received a MFA from Columbia and attended the Skowhegan School. She has been a resident at the Millay Art Colony, among others. She is a member of American Abstract Artists and curated the exhibit “Nature Abstracted” at The Painting Center. She also takes photographs, and considers her black and white photographs as source material for painting and drawing as well as works in their own right. Her work has been included in exhibits in the Northeast and in New York, most recently at the Metaphor and Sideshow Galleries, as well as at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, Colombia. She is participating in The National Academy Museum’s Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art on view concurrently with this show.

Claire Seidl has been an abstract painter for thirty years. She has had over twenty solo shows in New York City, where she is based, and in Maine, where she lives and works part of the year. Her work has been extensively reviewed in the art press - Art in America, the New York Observer, The New York Times, Art News, the Brooklyn Rail, the Portland Press Herald and other publications. She has shown her work in galleries, universities and museums including the Portland Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum, the McNay Art Museum, the Noyes Museum , the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and upcoming this summer at the Novrosibirsk State Art Museum in Russia.

The paintings in this show are representative of Seidl’s most recent work. Seidl’s sensibility is one of ordering and shaping that is both modest and certain, dark and joyful, emotional and restrained. Her art has achieved a level that is mature, confident and personal in its focus and vocabulary. She maintains a driven engagement in the search for the meaning of what is seen.

We hope to see you there!