MATRIX/REDUX at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX exhibition program with a year-long series of events, beginning with MATRIX/REDUX (on view through July 6). The MATRIX format—spontaneous, flexible, small-scale, and short-term—was “key to engendering experimentation on the part of both the artists and the institution, resulting in a mix of exhibitions that defied categorization and kept Berkeley at the forefront of international contemporary art,” according to the BAM/PFA website.
MATRIX/REDUX samples from the history of this important program with selections from the Museum’s collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. Included in the exhibition is Crèche (1997), a group of bronze fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls, created by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2). Past participants of the MATRIX program that have also been featured by Art21 include Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Susan Rothenberg (Season 3), and Richard Serra (Season 1).
Last Day: Susan Rothenberg in Athens
An exhibition of paintings by Susan Rothenberg (Season 3) closes today at Bernier-Eliades Gallery in Athens, Greece. Rothenberg’s paintings, through “thickly layered and intense brushwork…depict scenes from everyday life‚Äîeither an unpleasant event or a moment of remembrance. A distinctive element of these works is a tilted perspective which attributes an eerily objective psychological edge.”
Founded over thirty years ago, Bernier-Eliades Gallery has helped introduce Greece to artist currents such as Arte Povera, Minimalism, Land and Conceptual Art, and a generation of American and European contemporary artists. As Rothenberg mentions in her Art21 interview “Gestures,” she lived in Greece for a period during her 20s. Rothenberg is represented locally by Sperone Westwater Gallery, which also offers works by Art21 artists Laurie Simmons, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle and William Wegman.
