BE THERESpirits and FlowersPresented by Barry Friedman, Ltd. June 25, 2009- August 14, 2009Reception: June 25, 5:30 pm - 8:00 pmEdward Bekkerman
NEW YORK – Barry Friedman Ltd. is pleased to present Spirits and Flowers, an exhibition of oil paintings by the contemporary artist Edward Bekkerman. The exhibition will mark Bekkerman’s first solo exhibit with the gallery and will be on view on the 3rd floor until August 14, 2009. Edward Bekkerman, a Russian American artist, produces work known for its painterly quality and strong use of color, but also for the raw and haunting sensory experience it provides. Bekkerman prefers to work on an unprimed canvas with a palette knife; applying color in short, rapid strokes that appear flat at the beginning and thick at the end. The effect is a surface regular in its unevenness. By nailing his canvas to the stretcher, his work develops additional texture and a quality similar to Art Brut and Post-War Modernism. The works in Bekkerman’s Spirits series are at their core abstract and neo-expressionist. Their sequence of wavering vertical forms are gestural and impulsive yet quasi-graphic. They almost seem to reference modern media and refracted pixels. Bekkerman creates hues that flicker onto one another and merge figures into abstraction. The works, although shrieking and extroverted, are also beautiful aesthetic projections of colorful fleeting apparitions. In Flowers, Bekkerman takes a more literal approach without compromising his signature style. His tactile, harsh, and forceful application of paint retains its dreamy and delicate palette, and the gradations of warm and cold create a glowing, aural, and surreal structural dichotomy. Jonathan Goodman, art critic and professor at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design, writes, “[Bekkerman] expresses himself by creating forms that are specific in their shape and also transparent – rather like what we might expect the angelic to be. The real difficulty facing Bekkerman is found in the very hard task of giving form to what we but partially know, if we know at all. The artist’s audience must trust his explorations and discoveries as interesting in their own right – even if the terms of their portrayal defy convention.” The works in Spirits and Flowers are energetic and depict the moment where the extraterrestrial meets truth. We see Bekkerman’s work as a paradox between the subconscious and the aesthetics of reality. Edward Bekkerman lives and works in New York City. His work is included in the permanent collections of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Reflex Miniature Museum of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, Netherlands, as well as numerous private collections across the United States and Europe. For more information, please contact Carole Hochman or Karen Gilbert at 212-239-8600
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