Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Aurora, New York—The Wells College Visual Arts Department announced its featured spring exhibition of the 2009–10 academic year, "monotypes and paintings" by Brooklyn-based artist Neil Berger. The paintings and prints will be on display in the String Room Gallery (SRG) from March 31 through May 9. The exhibit is free and the public is cordially invited to view the show. An opening reception on Wednesday, March 31 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. offers an opportunity to meet the artist; light refreshments will be served.

Most of the exhibition’s works feature landscapes, though portraiture and cityscapes are also included. The SRG’s Director, William Ganis, notes, “these are decidedly our views—of mud season, sunrises yielding to cloudy days, transient vernal streams, and a January thaw’s patchy snows. These are the spaces of quiet beauty that we all know.” Berger once called Ithaca home.

He paints intimate works of oil on canvas, but also makes complementary monotypes. These are created by painting on a piece of Plexiglass that is then run though a printing press so that the image is transferred onto paper. This process yields marks have a nearly photographic range of tones. The exhibition consists of eleven paintings and eleven monotypes.

Berger’s honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for printmaking (2007); an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2001); a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, for painting (2004); and a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Award (1989). His work has been exhibited at the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca; the Schweinfurth Art Center, Auburn; Washington Square East Galleries in New York City and The Painting Center also in New York City, among many other venues. His solo exhibitions include shows at the Coulter Young Gallery, Peekskill; Main Street Gallery, Dobbs Ferry; Garrison Arts Center, Garrison; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira; the David Sarnoff Research Center, Princeton and Grove Gallery, Aurora.

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