Alphonse Berber Gallery Introduces “New Images of Man and Woman”

Alphonse Berber Gallery is bringing “New Images of Man and Woman,” a group exhibition of three iconic Bay Area figurative artists, Nathan Oliveira, Stephen de Staebler and William Theophilus Brown as well as five younger artists, featuring Ursula O’Farrell, Frances Lerner, Ryoko Tajiri, Marianne Kolb and Michael Ryan Noble. Like their characteristic predecessors, the younger artists create art which addresses the human condition. They continue and expand the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture with manifest and innovative energy. It will take place in Berkeley, CA: 2546 Bancroft Way, from December 4, 2009-January 30 2010. The opening reception will be on December 4th from 6-9pm, and all artists will be present at the reception.

This show and its catalog have become iconic for its recognition that even in an age where abstraction was the dominant style, the human image continued to be of great concern to artists who reaffirmed its persistent presence even after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.  In addition to presenting the work of leading figurative artists: Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon and painters Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who turned to figuration at the time, were introduced to Europeans including Karl Appel, César, Germaine Richier and Eduardo Paolozzi to the American public as well as Americans who weren’t very known in New York at that time, such as Leon Golub, H. C. Westermann, Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira. Now, fifty years later, after Pop Art and Op Art, Conceptual Art, Video, Happenings and Performance Art, Earth Art and Land Art made their mark, painters and sculptors continue to create images of human beings, because, as Leonard Baskin affirmed fifty years ago: “Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. Glorious in defining sodality and glorious in defining utter uniqueness”.