 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
IN MEMORY OF DAVID BIERK
June 9, 1944 - August 28, 2002
To honor the painter David Bierk, who died on August 28, 2002 in Peterborough, Canada, the gallery has installed an exhibition, including his recent paintings, entitled "In Memory: David Bierk." His last painting entitled Still, is included in the gallery's exhibition "Celebrating 30 Years."
David Bierk, A Eulogy to Art & Life, Still Life Fragment, after Vermeer, 2001-02,
oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 65 inches
David Bierk, a Canadian painter, died on August 28 in Peterborough, Ontario. He was 58.
Mr. Bierk, who was suffering from leukemia, died of pneumonia, said Nancy Hoffman, his New York dealer.
Mr. Bierk worked in the postmodern genre, in which images and forms appropriated from art history and the mass media are juxtaposed to prompt philosophical reflections on art, modern culture and history.
He painted copies of works by artists like Vermeer or the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, for example, and framed them within broad steel panels, setting up a tension between humanism and old masterly craft on the one hand, and Modernist abstraction and industrial fabrication on the other.
Most recently, he was working on a series of copies of late floral still lifes by Manet, which he set within steel or concrete frames.
Born in Appleton, Minnesota, on June 9, 1944, Mr. Bierk grew up in Lafayette, California, near San Francisco.
In 1972, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Humboldt State University, and in the same year he moved to Peterborough to take a teaching job at Kenner Collegiate, a high school.
Two years later, he founded a successful nonprofit art gallery called Artspace, for which he continued to serve as director until 1987. He became a Canadian citizen in 1978.
Mr. Bierk's first marriage, to Kathleen Bierk, ended in divorce.
He is survived by his wife, Liz; eight children, Sebastian Bach of Lincroft, New Jersey, the former lead singer for the rock group Skid Row; Heather Dylan of Toronto; Lisa Hare of Walnut Creek, California; Zac, Alexander, Jeffrey, Nicholas and Charles, all of Peterborough; and four grandchildren.
David Bierk, After Heade, Locked in Migration, A Eulogy to Life, 2001, oil on canvas, steel, 60 1/2 x 67 1/2 inches
In Memory of David Bierk, Installation. 2002
In Memory of David Bierk, Installation, 2002
David Bierk, Flowers in Stone, to Fantin-Latour and Manet, oil on canvas, concrete, 31 x 27 inches, 2001
&
David Bierk, Flowers in Stone, to Manet, oil on canvas, concrete, 31 x 27 inches, 2001
David Bierk, Hudson Moon, 2001, oil on canvas, 61 x 49 inches.