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international painting annual 3 exhibition-in-print
online resource







Thomas Berding
East Lansing, Michigan

Michigan State University, Associate Professor

berding@msu.edu




detail image

statement

Made in response to the post-industrial landscape, my paintings draw upon the sense of refuse and the promise of refuge that urban centers and ports of commerce suggest. The network of city streets and built structures, serve as a stage on which more mercurial behaviors, fleeting notions, and unrequited longings play out.

When translated to the language of painting, I am enthralled by how the exoskeletal diagrams of plotters and planners and the traffic of more spontaneous and improvisational paint-handling inform each other.  Invariably, the most memorable images that emerge seem to be those that suggest more than they describe, surfacing some image that lies buried just beneath our waking awareness.  True to the layered and dense nature of my sources, it is in a hybrid space, somewhere between abstraction and figuration, that I find the most room for discovery to occur.

 


bio

born: 1962, Cincinnati, Ohio


education

Rhode Island School of Design, MFA, 1987
Xavier University, BA, 1984


selected awards/honors

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1993
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 1992


selected solo or two-person exhibits

Tha Painting Center, Project Room: One Person Exhibition, New York, NY, 2013
David Klein Gallery: Gesture and Geometry, Birmingham, MI, 2008


selected group shows

The Painting Center: Natural/Constructed Spaces,  New York, NY, 2012
The Painting Center: Charged Brushes,  New York, NY, 2012
Art Chicago, International Art Fair: Chicago, IL, 2008
Red Dot Miami, International Art Fair: Miami, FL, 2007

 

 

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