EDGE IN
Caitlin Berndt
October 30-November 17, 2019
Opening Reception: October 30, 6-8 pm (by RSVP only)
(RSVP only: RSVP to info@kateohgallery.com)
Kate Oh Gallery is delighted to present Edge In, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Caitlin Berndt. This series of small gouache paintings and larger oil paintings incorporates spray paint, acrylic airbrush, and sand. Like waking dreams, it takes your eyes a minute to adjust and decode what you’re looking at. Couples, little girls, spiky cacti, and Venus flytrap structures flicker in and out of focus revealing themselves in psychedelic-colored worlds. These dreamlands are playful, sexual, and strange.
The title refers to pushing oneself into an uncomfortable or precarious space where truth and fiction commingle. Caitlin’s work stems from personal narrative. In the past, she has drawn source material from fragments of pop culture, personal photographs, and memory. For this new body of work, she created maquettes that she illuminated with digital projection. One of these physical sources was a sculpture of her and her partner camping. Charting a recent transition from marriage cynic to newlywed, the content of her work shifted from selfhood to the intimacy of partnership, selfhood-within-partnership, and the living myths woven between the two.
While Berndt’s technique is evocative of her experience painting from life, studying color from Italian frescos, and copying master works, her paintings break free of categorization. Utilizing her intuitive sense of color to explore the nuances of intimacy, she has created textural, atmospheric compositions that are steeped in emotion and subversion.
Caitlin Berndt was born in Baltimore, MD (1983) and lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore, MD (2006) and her MFA from The University of Washington (UW), School of Art, Seattle, WA (2012). Her paintings have been featured in exhibitions nationwide, including the Zolla/Leiberman Gallery in Chicago, the Bryan Ohno Gallery and Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and the NO.4 Studio Gallery in Brooklyn, among others. Berndt was awarded the Elizabeth Greensheild’s Foundation grant 2007 and has had fellowships in Spain, Italy and Israel. In 2013 she was resident at the Vermont Studio Center. In addition to her studio practice, she has taught visual arts courses at Pratt Institute, MICA, UW and the College of New Jersey. She is currently an adjunct professor at CUNY City College of New York.
Brooklyn-based artist, Caitlin Berndt’s current exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery, “Edge In,” is steeped in an art historical tradition that draws from the abstracted figures and object-studies of American Abstraction’s field paintings, while mediated by the bleeding orphic dyes of Kupka, Léger and Delaunay’s Fauvism. Delicately fettered in this harmony, Berndt’s balance between small-scale gouache paintings and large-scale oil works uncovers the relationship between frayed perception and personal mythos. Domestic indices of organic life—fauna, cacti and Venus flytraps—vacillate between beclouded shadows and fractured materiality, a dialectic practice that reproduces the uncanny process of hallucination, or that which Berndt terms an “acid desert dreamland.” Thus, one such cactus subsumes the sun's flaxen rays, its thorns turned orange, while an inky aquamarine plash swathes the entire canvas.
Despite our postmodern epoch has effaced the cannon of “representational art,” Berndt’s deliberate decision to salvage the markers of post-impressionist domesticity culls the practice of cathartic meditation and retrospection. Redolent of suspended dancers, the florid botany and flickering shadows adoring Berndt’s canvases evoke the process of reassembling cloaked memories. For Berndt, these works are not simply pedagogical studies of relational aesthetics or philosophical encroachments upon the sublime but, instead, recollect the unveiling of everyday life from the recesses of memory.
Berndt’s rhythmic images also recall her artistic process, as her paintings are often the product of threading relics of material culture into an aggregate assemblage. With Edge In, Berndt’s methodology is mildly reminiscent of that of Gerhard Richter, albeit Berndt has no interest in preserving the fold of photorealism: while, like Richter, these paintings were originally conceived of as digital projections, they also trace sculptural studies and intimate reminiscence. In turn, Edge In invites the viewer to disentangle familiar images of romance and quotidian life from their narrative accord.