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| DAVID
BIERK
David Bierk,
LANDSCAPE #1, oil on steel panel, 28 x 40 inches, 2000
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| David
Bierk was born in Appleton, Minnesota in 1944. He received both a B.A. and
an M.A. from Humboldt State University, Arcata, California. He also attended
California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. |
David Bierk,
Still Life #1, to Caravaggio, oil on steel panel, 28 x 40 inches, 2000
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| David
Bierk's paintings explore four distinct areas in depth and intensity: landscapes,
portraits, still lifes and what the artist calls "history paintings."
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paths run parallel, interweaving on a regular basis. The still lifes are
most often flowers, based on works by Edouard Manet, Fantin-Latour, or the
Dutch masters. They often include traditional symbols: fruit, vegetables,
goblets, the stuff of voluptuous table coverings. While Bierk pays homage
to masters throughout art history, a signature aspect of his work, he always
paints the image in his own style filled with gusto, bold strokes and vibrant
color. |
David Bierk,
Still Life, Locked in Migration, to Kalf, oil on canvas,
rusted iron on board, 51 x 46 inches, 2001 |
David Bierk,
Requiem for a Planet, Hudson River Evening,
oil on copper patina on canvas, 64 x 88 inches, 2000 |
| 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 in this country and Canada, always returning to home base 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 paint. It was in his landscapes of the '80s that
the artist's sheer joy in the process of painting came to the fore. Bierk's
history paintings are an on-going dialogue, often diptychs, sometimes triptychs.
The diptychs usually juxtapose a slice of romantic Bierk landscape on one
side with an homage to a master on the other. At times the "master"
image is a fragment of a still life, at others a figure or portrait. |
David Bierk,
Requiem for a Planet, to Ingres, oil on canvas,
oil on ink-jet photograph on canvas, 28 x 41 inches, 2001 |
David Bierk,
Memory of a Planet, to Ingres, oil on canvas,
oil on ink-jet photograph on canvas, 23 x 42 inches, 2001 |
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creating two sides of equal intensity, the artist has eliminated the pre-modern
concept of central focus and created a duet of focal points. Each side can
or could stand on its own merits, but together the diptychs pose questions
about history, art history, contemporary painting, pictorial space, paint
as subject, frame as window and more. Bierk paints the two sides of the
diptychs in a palette that is harmonious and sustains the mood in the paint
from left to right. It is the joining of color and mood that makes it all
work. New for the artist is the element of fashion and the juxtaposition
of a contemporary fashion icon with an image from art history or a luminous
landscape. |
David Bierk,
Flowers in Stone, to Fantin-Latour and Manet, oil on canvas, concrete, 31
x 27 inches, 2001
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David Bierk, Flowers in Stone, to Manet, oil on canvas, concrete, 31 x 27
inches, 2001 |
| 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 painted a self-portrait revisiting Leonardo daVinci's
landscape as a background. The artist's approach to historical images is
not simply curatorial, but conceptual. The work he creates "after"
the masters is never a straight copy. It is altered in scale and in palette.
It is always contemporized and re-contextualized by adding a word with many
layers of meaning, or framing an "old master"-looking painting
in a steel or rusted-iron surround (a material of contemporary times with
contemporary connotations). Bierk's paintings after the masters are done
in the spirit of praise, celebration, and as an homage to the act of painting.
He is re-presenting imagery from the past and transforming it through his
hand and mind and eye. |
David Bierk,
Hudson Moon, oil on canvas, 56 x 44 inches, 2001 |
| David
Bierk's Biography |
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| David
Bierk's 2001 Exhibition |
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| More
on David Bierk |
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