SEVEN VIGNETTES

Jan 12

Written By MB

NEW WORKS BY BETH BERGMAN

Form+Content is excited to present new paintings from 2022 and 2023 by Beth Bergman. After retiring from her 33-year tenure as owner of Wet Paint Artists' Materials, she is back to a studio art practice. These works are deeply anchored in the physicality of the materials. As her paintings from the 1970s and 1980s were very much about color and mark-making, the new work is color intense but no longer fields of repetitive brushstrokes. The new marks come from not only the brush but drawing materials and various printmaking techniques. The grid appears as an armature rather than the composition itself. A new interest in composition has resulted in collage being a significant part of the image-building process.

January 18 - February 24, 2024

Gallery hours: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 12:00 noon – 6:00 pm and by appointment

Public Reception

Saturday, January 20, 2:00 - 5:00 pm

Artist's Talk: Sunday, February 11, 2:00 pm

A Conversation with Beth Bergman and Shannon Brunette, founder of Office of Cultural Work

Closing Reception
Saturday, February 24, 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Artist’s Statement

Bergman’s new works are abstract, or nearly so. There are some recognizable shapes. There are some familiar associations. She sees these as hooks. To get you started looking into the image. That contemplation of color, line, form, value, contrast leads to the contemplation of self, space, differences, threads, joy, breath, and maybe even beauty.

The Seven Vignettes are Wander, Seaweed, Close to Home, Lost Goddess, Vase, Open, and A Series. The Seven Vignettes fit into the seven bays of the Form+Content Gallery. They aren’t stories or series but have associative relationships.

Wander: These paintings came after a road trip across North Dakota and Montana to Glacier National Park, and then back again.

Seaweed: These works came together in three ways very quickly. Bergman returned from a long trip to Scandinavia and Scotland where everything seems directed by water and named uniquely by country. The compositions were collaged together from papers left over from other images and series. She also had some earlier paintings critiqued for being too seaweedy.
Lost Goddess paintings started with collage remnants from other paintings. Bergman has used goddess images in earlier works at the WARM Gallery and in the Women’s Art Institute summer studio intensive course at St. Catherine University. These new goddesses are buried under surface marks, demarcated by negative space, lost or buried as goddesses have been lost, buried, and erased in western European culture.

Vase came out of a personal search for a neutral shape, one that wasn’t appropriated, one not too loaded with associations. Neutralizing the shape in a relatively straightforward bull’s eye composition allows the viewer to dive into the surfaces created by repeated monotype printing and layers of translucent papers.

Close to Home paintings include shapes that one may associate with a figure, a landscape, a still life. They hover in that region of almost, nearly, familiar, close to home.

Open refers to the commonality between the four pieces which have a more open composition than the other paintings in this exhibit. There are more broad-planed shapes.

The seventh vignette has no name but A Series because their titles all begin with "A." Approached more like a traditional series, they were worked on at the same time and all include a slightly different approach with the beginning monoprint transitioning to collage to painting.