99 dover street • somerville • massachusetts 02144
617.629.9400
gallery email: gb@bershad.com
Grand Opening and Reception
January 23, 1999
V i t a l S i g n s
Mischa Richter, Vladimira Klumpar, Ellen Sperling
On
January 23, 1999,
Gallery Bershad opened as a new venue for the display
of vanguard art in Somerville, a community known for its artistic vitality.
Gallery
Bershad is an outgrowth of the historic Provincetown
Group Gallery and is affiliated with the respected Boston architecture
firm of Bershad Design Associates.
With
over 250 feet of linear wall space in an exhibit area of more than 1500 square
feet, Gallery Bershad offers a unique alternative to Boston's smaller art
venues. Situated in the heart of Somerville's hip neighborhood of Davis Square,
the gallery will engage the creative energy of this artistic community. Local
emerging artists will share the space with internationally known artists who
include: Mark Priest, Rosalind Burns and Sandra Guiloff of Chile,
Jim Peters, and Boston's own Gale Fulton Ross.
Mischa
Richter is well known as a cartoon artist at The New Yorker Magazine,
and as a founding member of The Provincetown Group Gallery since its inception
in the 1950's. At eighty-eight years of age Richter's impressive painterly
career has spanned decades. He began working alongside Siquieros and Orozco
for WPA mural projects in New York and Boston. Richter diverse artistic phases
are all driven with an action painter's aesthetic in combination with meditative
fields of color, to create an aesthetic where the "laws which govern visual
art deal with: the shape of given areas, arrangements of negative and positive
spaces within it, and the colors which reinforce such qualities." The body
of watercolor collages in Vital Signs was begun in the 1970's and includes
several images which have never been previously viewed.
Vladimira
Klumpar has exhibited her glass sculptures in venues throughout Europe
and the United States. Her sensuous glass and multi-media pieces engage a
dialogue between contradictory elements; blending delicate glass with reinforced
plaster. The sculptures' voluptuous curves reflect Klumpar's intimate relationship
with nature and contrast with the elements' cold smooth surfaces. The animated
effects of light and reflection in the glass charge the simple clarity of
her forms with optical energy.
"Klumpar's work is exciting [and] provocative.
The measure of it grows and expands as we look at it,
think about it, and let go of our ideas of what glass ought to be."
Gloria Russell, Sunday Republican
"Vladimira Klumpar's delicately powerful sculptures combine
a play of light and dark, soft and hard, dark glass
against white shells, volumes and undulating planes
that evoke a sense of softened constructivist formalism."
Michael Boylen, Glass Magazine
Ellen
Sperling's drawings with graphite pencil on oil paint, evince an abstract
and figurative visual vocabulary. Jagged and rich, her cursive lines create
a language of personal hieroglyphs invested with a unique emotional impact.
Sperling draws in response to a model or landscape, often working with her weaker
hand for a raw gestural impact. Sperling received both the Hubbard Traveling
Fellowship Award from the Boston Visual Artists Union and the Chesebrough-Pond
Award for Drawing from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has shown her mixed-media
drawings and sculptures at the Aidekman Gallery of Tufts University and the
Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University.
