Flashback: Siri Berg at UNTITLED Miami, 2013
In 2013 Peter Hionas Gallery presented a retrospective-style exhibition of Siri’s work at the Miami Untitled Art Fair. Peter began exhibiting Siri’s work in 2012 and continued working closely with her, curating exhibitions and exhibiting, until her death in 2020. A catalogue was designed by Justin Wolf and published on the occasion of this fair. The catalogue essay appears below along with an instagram post by @Artprivee reporting that one of the exquisite and now rare white paintings sold to Beth Rudin Dewoody at the Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach, Dec 4-8, 2013. Here’s an excerpt of the catalogue essay written by Peter Hionas:
Originally published in the Siri Berg: Paintings: 1967-2013 exhibition catalog
A rondo is a formal principle in music in which simple patterns emerge, much like in poetry, with the one constant being the first and last notes are the same. Everything in between may vary, from audible repetitions, accelerations and decelerations of tempo, and stanzas that prolong the musical form. The rondo first came to the attention of Siri Berg when she read La Ronde, the late 19th-century play by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. In La Ronde, Schnitzler portrays a series of brief interactions between two characters of varying and, at times, opposing social classes. These encounters, whether filled with conversation, silence, flirtation or provocation, all provide interesting commentary on how class distinctions can color human relationships.
Upon encountering the play, Siri posed a question to herself: How would one aestheticize a rondo? More to the point, how does an artist create a visual rondo, one that begins and ends on the same note, as it were, while maintaining a gradation that adheres to the strictures of color theory? This inspired riddle, which conjures images of Bach, Schnitzler, and Albers all sitting at the roundtable, is the place where Siri Berg truly began her artistic career. The result was her 1972 piece La Ronde, comprising a series of fourteen 12-by-12 inch panels of opposing semi-circles, arranged in a continuous row. The relationships of color Berg creates—whether viewed as a standalone note or sustained chord—are surprising because one can almost sense that such distinct tones have never been placed side by side until now. Siri Berg is a masterful colorist, which is not to suggest she is merely a practitioner, producer or theorist thereof (all of which are true), but rather she is an inventor of color.
In the beginning, Siri’s abstract art needed a complementing abstract idea, a story or cornerstone on which to rely and revisit when needed. Until quite recently, she had applied this standard to each new body of work. Following La Ronde and similarly complex works like her Yin and Yang series (1968) and Kaleidoscope (1971), she looked to the writings of W.B. Yeats for her “Phases” series, rendering in visual form some of the poet’s more esoteric passages on the study of semiotics and lunar cycles. For the corresponding Black & White and Four Elements series, a spiritual sensibility emerges as she once again joins seemingly opposing entities: perfect geometric forms with basic representations of earth-bound forces of wind, earth, fire and water. For Kabbalah, a remarkable and seemingly endless series which marked her return to color in the mid 1980s, Siri draws inspiration from the Judaic teachings on the nature of self and its meaning within the universe. The precision and symmetry she applied to these works easily matched those of La Ronde, but a new compulsion had emerged. Siri began creating and re-creating the same image, over and over, using different media and executing at varying scale for each building block of her Black Series and White Series, each of her Four Elements and the Kabbalah. She was not necessarily seeking perfection but perhaps a sense of closure, a cosmic equilibrium that successfully wed plasticity and nature.
With each subsequent body of work, Siri’s scope and ambition continually grows. And yet, like a rondo, each series begins and ends with a premise, a guiding light, which precluded the need for something beautiful and abstract to simply be and not rely on outside forces.
Albers once wrote, "Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition." Some time in the early 1990s something exceptional occurred. While at work in her Manhattan studio, Siri laid out a modest sized piece of linen and applied horizontal and vertical bands of solid, complementing color, all varying in thickness. The bands overlapped at certain points, which lent each painting subtle degrees of shade juxtaposed with a limited spectrum of color. It was a study in executing simple beauty using the most basic forms, and it all stemmed from nothing more than her desire to see these things interact. She titled these works a series of Straight Line and Bars, a clear indication of her new found ease, even modesty, with which she approached the canvas. It was at this time—after more than 20 years of exploring and studying, of discovering meaning in color and shape and form and through various academic forays—that Siri began practicing her art as a form of highly personal expression.
Amidst this return to nature, Siri began to play with texture as well, meticulously applying layers of viscous oil onto defined portions of the canvas. It takes little more than a glimpse to realize how in command she is of this process. The subtle shifts from light to dark run deep yet are also evident at the surface, and brush strokes give way to points along the edges that she allows to bleed over the canvas ever so slightly. Katarina Cerny—whose introduction to Siri’s 1986 solo exhibition, “Black & White 1976-1981,” is re-printed in these pages— had looked to Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art as guidance, and the modern master’s words are just as appropriate here. “Color provides a whole wealth of possibilities of her own, and when combined with form, yet a further series of possibilities. And all these will be expressions of the inner need.” As Siri’s work matured and she found balance during this time, she also rediscovered not only this wealth of possibilities with color, but also what could be accomplished by reining it in. A great abstract work can find beauty from context, but its truth lies in utility; as she so aptly titles her culminating series of work, “It’s All About Color.”
This catalogue—as joyful as it was to put together, as it was to sit down with Siri in her studio on long afternoons to discuss her life’s work, peruse decades’ worth of archives, and examine hidden treasures up close—represents a mere fraction of what she has accomplished. The paintings are the beginning and the end, the bookends to her rondo, yet in between there is a vast sea of assemblage, collage, woodcuts, sculpture, drawings and sketches. There is enough work in her studio alone to fill one museum and two lifetimes. And yet, when conversing with Siri about her art, whether concerning a single painting or entire body of work, one is quick to realize that she is far from done.
Related Press: Complex | ArtMarket Monitor
