Untitled (15), 1991
Digital C-Print
37" x 24 5/8" (93.98 x 62.48 cm)
Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of color photographs by Robert Bergman. The exhibition, entitled A Kind of Rapture, will open on Thursday, November 5, and will close on Saturday, January 9, with a reception on Thursday, November 5, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Mr. Bergman has taken photographs for over 40 years; however, this year marks the premiere exhibitions of his work.
From 1985 through 1997, Robert Bergman traveled America's Midwest and East Coast by car with a 35mm format camera, taking portraits of people he met by chance. After spending a brief time with each subject, Bergman created portraits of people in the urban locations where he encountered them, using only available light. The exhibition will include approximately seventeen 37″ × 24.6″ digital C-prints.
Color, composition, light and the artist's engagement with each subject, combine to form portraits that reflect the individuality of each subject and give insight into our shared humanity. Art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote of Mr. Bergman's photographs, "His finest works bring to mind some of the greatest painted portraits…The authenticity of Bergman's art appears in the 'hypnotic' impact of faces that have attracted him as bearers of an unfathomable human presence, a self and a human condition. Here are masterful revelations of states of existence in the inner and outer person - truly profound works of art."
The gallery's exhibition will coincide with the artist's two debut solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Bergman (October 11, 2009 - January 10, 2010) and at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Robert Bergman: Selected Portraits (October 25, 2009 - January 4, 2010). Mr. Bergman's book, A Kind of Rapture, was published in 1998 by Pantheon and contains essays by Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize recipient Toni Morrison and renowned art historian Meyer Schapiro.
Robert Bergman was born in 1944 in New Orleans. He currently divides his time between Minnesota and New York.