LEARNING from EXHIBITIONS after HISTORY The Paintings of David Bierk

David Bierk, an artist who has reconsidered traditions and ideas of the past to create an art for the new millennium, focuses on three distinct subject areas in his paintings: landscapes, still lifes and what the artist calls "history paintings."

Bierk abstracts and adapts these subjects to create personal tributes to the works of such renowned masters as Caravaggio, Vermeer, Ingres, Fantin-Latour, Manet, Bierstadt and Hopper, among others. While basing his compositions on art masterpieces from the past, he places these new images in a contemporary context with a boldness and bravura that is vintage Bierk.

"His artistry rejuvenates them [Old Masters], suggesting that their message remains eternally young and fresh. His handling is filled with the force of life, as though to restore life to the old painting, and above all to remind us of the value of the life it renders, and of life in general. Bierk revitalizes the old masterpieces rather than simply reproducing them."(*)

Born in Appleton, Minn., in 1944, Bierk now resides in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and received a master of fine arts degree from Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. He has become a citizen of Canada and is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He has exhibited widely, and his work is included in numerous public collections across North America.

According to Bierk, "My work is a continuous examination of the human condition. My approach is to look back at what has gone before, to consider the state of the present day and to let the paintings become an expression of the resulting dialectic."

This fusion of past and present is amply illustrated in paintings from Bierk's early career through to his most recent creations. His compositions frequently address the nostalgia of our times for the traditional painting styles of previous centuries, while demonstrating how these classic styles have coalesced and been transformed to create the pluralism indicative of the modern age.

Well before the movement or term "appropriation" was coined, Bierk was plumbing the riches of art history for images that suited the direction of his work. As early as 1969, he revisited a Leonardo da Vinci landscape as a background for his own self-portrait. The artist's approach to historical images is not simply curatorial, but conceptual.

The work Bierk creates "after" the masters is never a straight copy, rather it is always contemporized and re-contextualized by adjusting its traditional presentation. Thus, his paintings after the masters are created purely in the spirit of praise, celebration and as an homage to the act of painting.

By rendering Old Master art as a quotation, Bierk strips it of its historical husk, exposing the kernel of eternal meaning that gives it credibility. For Bierk, the act of quotation is an act of idealization, indeed, of revelation. He searches out art that has made history because it tells us something about what seems to be of constant value in human history."*

Bierk represents imagery from the past--transforming it and revitalizing it through his hand, mind and eye. His landscapes are invented, never specific places. They are infused with the ambiance of painters he loves from the 19th century and before. Among his favorites are Constable, Keith, Inness and Church.

Bierk has traveled far and wide, always returning home with photographs of evening skies and cloud-filled vistas. Like the 19th-century American painters whose reverence for landscape was made manifest in paint, Bierk paints poetic and romantic landscapes with layer upon layer of luscious oil pigment. It was in his landscapes of the 1980s that the artist's sheer joy in the process of painting came to the fore.

Bierk's painted surfaces are so rich and luminous in their painted layers of oils and varnishes--10 to 12 are not uncommon--that the eye can be fooled as to which support material he has chosen to work with: copper, board or canvas.

His most recent exploration of technique is ink-jet photography onto which he may apply a thin veil of oil paint and infuse a "craquelure" effect to convey notions of age and time. Occasionally, a single word will appear on top of an image to further stress the artist's implied message.

In some of Bierk's paintings, the "master" image is a fragment of a still life, in others a figure or portrait. Frequently, he will juxtapose two seemingly disparate images into a single unified composition. By creating two sides of equal intensity, the artist has eliminated the pre-modern concept of central focus and created a pair of focal points. Each side can or could stand on its own merits, but together these diptychs pose questions about history, art history, contemporary painting, pictorial space, paint as subject, frame as window and more.

"His Old Master fragments--they, too, are ironically ruins, however much they resonate with inner life, and represent life at its most resonant--convey the thought that something precious has been lost in the contemporary world, something which is magically preserved, as though in amber, in the old masterpieces."(*)

Most recently, Bierk has used fragments of historical masterpieces in combination with his own imaginary landscapes, or in combination with or surrounded by surfaces of rusted iron, steel or textured concrete. Such materials suggest both imprisonment and sanctuary, as they simultaneously confine and preserve the painted images.

Bierk explains, "The very nature of these associations of past and present, organic and inorganic, embodies a view of the world which critiques modernism, mourns the loss of humanism, and searches for a balance between the forces which shape contemporary existence."

"Bierk's pictures are elusive, meticulously staged paradoxes: they may be eulogies to art, life and human nature, but they are also melancholy memento mori, mournful embraces of art, life and human nature, as the rusted iron in which they are entombed suggests."(*)

By confronting the present with the styles and techniques of the past, David Bierk creates an art that is both classic and contemporary. Bierk's paintings are respectful celebrations of art history and a recapitulation, for a new age, of ideals and values that are timeless. In opening this dialogue with history, both the artist and the viewer must now reconsider the past as we move into the future.

ITINERARY

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Montgomery, Alabama
Through January 7, 2001

Hunter Museum of Art
Chattanooga, Tennessee
February 10-March 18, 2001

Telfair Museum of Art
Savannah, Georgia
June 26-August 26, 2001

Las Vegas Art Museum
Las Vegas, Nevada
September-November, 2001(*)

Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences
Evansville, Indiana
January 20-March 10, 2002

afterHISTORY: The Paintings of David Bierk is organized and circulated by the Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Arts.

(*) Exact dates to be determined.

(*) Quotes by Donald Kuspit from the book David Bierk, 2000, published by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 2000.

Mark M. Johnson is Director of the Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Arts, and is a Contributing Editor for Arts & Activities.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Publishers' Development Corporation
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