Review (via ArtPulse): Siri Berg: In Color
Siri Berg, In Color (installation view), 2016. Courtesy of Hionas Gallery and Shirley Fiterman Art Center, BMCC, New York.
Shirley Fiterman Art Center
November 17, 2016
By Kim Power
Joseph Albers, artist and author of the groundbreaking book Interaction of Color (1963), once said, “Colors influence and change each other forth and back. They continuously interact-in our perception.”
Siri Berg’s solo exhibition “In Color” at Shirley Fiterman Art Center, curated by Peter Hionas of Hionas Gallery, presents a mini retrospective of a life spent examining this very premise, with more than 70 artworks on display. In a career spanning some 30 years, Berg’s works have been included in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Southwest State University Art Museum, New Mexico; Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, N.Y.; and the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, where she was born.
In a reverse time line the exhibition begins with six large rectangular panels, evenly spaced, named for their local colors, Purple, Red, Orange, Light Green, Aqua Blue and Dark Green (all created in 2015). Color fields that can be placed in any order, these six panels set the tone for all the other works, as if they are the genesis and not terminus of her explorations, reducing color to its most minimal characteristics and allowing it to be experienced solely on the merits of its factual existence alone. Refreshing as this display might be, it also has the potential for the mundane, and so the mind wanders into subjective query.
