Berlin Collective Artist Residency Program Catalogue Residency Program November 2013 – September 2014 in New York City
The Global Artist Network www.berlincollective.de
DENISE TREIZMAN is a Chilean artist who received her MFA in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts. Her awards include SVA’s Paula Rhodes award, NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Program, the AIM program from the Bronx Museum of Arts and a Robert Sterling Clark Foundation fellowship for Vermont Studio Center Residency. Treizman has also been a resident at Pantocrator Gallery (Shanghai), OxBow (Michigan), Brooklyn Art Space and NARS Foundation (Brooklyn). www.denisetreizman.com
"Sunset Park", 2014, Dimensions: Variable, In-flux installation made with found and readymade objects
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: My work is initiated by chance encounters with ready-made objects and leftovers I find in my daily life. During my BC residency, I immersed myself in the streets of Sunset Park to create a site-specific installation that was constantly in flux for a one-month period. Exploring this limitless quality of my work resulted in a playful, spontaneous process exploring ideas of informality, improvisation and new forms of sculptural assemblage.
RACHEL LIBESKIND is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is a mixture of painting, sculpture, collage and assemblage and often deals with issues of history through appropriation. Libeskind has shown her work in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Lithuania, and will be shown in Berlin, Austria and New York in 2015. She is represented by Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden in Chelsea. www.rachellibeskind.com
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: During my residency, I worked on manipulating and playing with a 3D rendering of my own head and face. During this process, I discovered the many faces that can be seen on the interior of the three-dimensional rendering. This was a project that dealt with perceptions of the self and uncanniness of physiology when it is replicated exactly from reality.
The Man Inside My Face, 3D rendering of Artist's face, Dimensions Variable (digital image), 2014
GWENDOLYN KERBER is an American painter based in Berlin and in Newtown, Pennsylvania. She holds an M.F.A. in painting from Yale University, a B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a B.A. from Hampshire College. Kerber has been the recipient of several awards and residencies, including a recent residency at the Vermont Studio Center (2013), The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1979), and The Dagaocun Artist in Residency Programme in Beijing (2008). In 2013 she was a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient. www.gwendolynkerber.com
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: My residency was in February 2014. It was a month of record breaking snowfall in New York City. The work I did during my residency continued my involvement with paintings that come off the wall and into the viewer’s space. There is a tension between the painterly image, with its illusion of space, and the physical presence of the constructed piece. The materials are an important element; the delicate threads on the edge of a cut piece of canvas, the way paint on wood has a different quality than paint on canvas. The seemingly tenuous way the pieces hang on tiny rods, or are suspended by gratuitous amounts of picture wire give the pieces both a quality of vulnerability and a bit of humor. Somehow living in Sunset Park for that month lent a particular edge to the work.
Possibly Now VIII, Oil on canvas, wire rods, wood, 10 x 9 x 6 inches, 2014
Photo credit: Chloe Richard
MIRA O’BRIEN is an American artist based in Berlin since 2008. She received her BA from UCLA (2004) and her MFA from Yale (2008). She has had solo-exhibitions at General Public in Berlin, Vierter Stock Galerie with support by a grant from the US Embassy in Berlin, and as a solo performance and installation in the historic Volksbßhne theatre in Berlin. She has participated in group shows internationally, including in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Kassel (as a side program of Documenta 2012), Spain, San Francisco, etc. and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies. www.miraobrien.com
"Imperfect Barrier: Screen", watercolor, ink, gouache on paper, glass, plastic, 58" long x 62" high x13" wide, 2014
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: My time in NY gave me an important new insight into an ongoing body of work. In my series "Imperfect Barriers," I use the pattern of a chain-link fence whose diamond-grid has warped and become more organic over time. I focus on moments of rupture where the fence has been cut open by someone trying to get in or out and then stitched back together by someone on the opposing side. I use the lines and patterns formed by this unwilling collaboration as a source material for my work. While in NY, I became very aware of the extreme income inequality that plays a role in shaping every aspect of society. Living and having a studio in the working class neighborhood of Sunset Park and then going to Manhattan, just a few subway stops away, to visit museums and shows was an experience of extremes. I started to recognize invisible barriers everywhere I went, in addition to more formal structural barriers. This made me really examine the imagery of fences and barriers in my own work through a new lens and the inherent inequality of being on one or the other side of a barrier.
LILIAN KREUTZBERGER, the Netherlands 1984, received a BFA at the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague (2007) and she received a Fulbright for her Master of Fine Arts programme at Parsons New School, New York (May 2013). She currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands (2007); the Royal Palace, Amsterdam (2009); and the Dutch pavilion at the World Expo, Shanghai, China (2010). Her work is held in the Gemeentemuseum collection, the Caldic Collection and in the Eileen Kaminsky Family Foundation. Kreutzberger received the emerging artist grant and a study grant from the Mondriaan Fund (2008, 2010 & 2011). Her work was nominated twice for the Royal Prize for Painting and won the Buning Brongers prize for painting in 2008. Kreutzberger made was commissioned by The Rietveld Architects in New York to make a permanent work for a residential building in Rijswijk, the Netherlands. She took part in a collaborative project/laboratory ‘Existentie’ (BE) and was an Artist in Resident at ESKFF residency program. www.liliankreutzberger.nl
EAF Socrates Park Installation, 2014
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: Moments in which the reality does or doesn’t match the previously imagined, are both source and the condition of the work itself. As painter and sculptor, my aim is to synthesize my research in regards to the futility, dilemmas and challenges of modern utopias and the role that urban spaces play within them.
JOE DAVIDSON works in sculpture and installation.
His work employs the use of disparate materials, notably Scotch tape, urethane foam, epoxies and plaster. His work usually consists of objects cast in multiples to create large-scale installations. He was born in Massachusetts and moved to California to attend graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute. He moved to Los Angeles in 2001, where he currently lives and works. He is a 2008/09 recipient of the City of Los Angeles Fellowship (COLA). He exhibits throughout North America, where he has shown with Tatar Gallery in Toronto, Marine in Santa Monica, and Carl Berg Projects in West Hollywood, CA. www.joedavidson.net
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: I arrived in New York with no agenda. I flew in from Los Angeles with a few sculptural sketches in my head, but thought the experience of a residency was contingent on place. Why would I go to a new environment to make the same things I make at my studio? There couldn't have been a better decision. I picked up a few bags of plaster in Tribeca, hauled them over to Brooklyn via subway, and just went to work. The relatively short timeline of a monthlong residency created focus. That, and the pulse of NY (compared to LA), gave me fantastic new insights that can happen when one is taken out of their comfort zone. It opened up new directions that I couldn't have thought possible without the jolt of the new environment.
Red Tip Nine, 2014, Plaster, automotive paint, each component, 9" x 6" x 6"
JAANIKA PEERNA is an Estonian-born artist living and working primarily in New York since 1998. Her work encompasses drawing, video, installation and performance, often dealing with the theme of transitions in light, air, water and other natural phenomena.She has exhibited her work extensively in the entire New York metropolitan area as well as in Berlin, Paris, Tallinn, Helsinki, Lisbon, Rimini, Dubai, Moscow and Rome. Solo exhibition of her drawing installation opens in February 2015 at Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, New York. Along the exhibition an art book of Peerna's recent work called Storms and Silences is published by Terra Nova Books. .www.jaanikapeerna.net
Ongoing Graphite and Color pencils on Mylar Wall Installations
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY EXPERIENCE: I spent a delightful yet intense month in Brooklyn taking in the local scene and working hard on developing my new series of installations using free hand straight line drawing on mylar. All those drawings are made with graphite and color pencils and the straight line is a result of long term practice as well as letting gravity do its job. I literally let myself fall with pencils in hands and leave traces of the movement onto the surface of mylar.
* Artists Listed in the Berlin Collective Artist Residency Catalogue in chronological order.
Berlin Collective, copyright, 2015