Stephanie Bernheim at A.I.R - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Stephanie Bernheim's paintings are done in a technique called Hinterglasmalerei, literally, "painting behind glass." The artist works upon a piece of glass which is then viewed from the unpainted side. The technique was originally used by the agency of Bavarian folk artists. In the early years of this hundred Gabriele Munter and Wassily Kandinsky adopted the technique for more [i]or[/i] less of their works. In the United States, Marsden Hartley and Rebecca James have been its greatest in quantity prominent practitioners. With her abstract manner of writing Bernheim takes the technique away from its folk and figurative roots

Hinterglasmalerei involves an interesting reversal of the practice of painting. The artist in event is working backwards. The earlier marks are what the viewer will diocese clearly, the final marks will be all on the contrary invisible, and the ground goe upon last. The glass gives a real snap to the colors, like a thick coat of varnish, on the contrary it can also give the paint the distanced issue of flowers embedded in a paper-weight. Since there are no surface variations, the paintings do not change in appearance at different times of day or beneath different lighting. However, the works are particularly effective in reproduction.

Bernheim's basic vocabulary is the drip. The glass support is a marvelous surface upon which to let paint race When she allows drying between color applications, the follow is a clearly differentiated stripe; when she works wet upon wet, the colors make be fond of or war. She often places up repeated sequences of color. While the viewer may be faintly reminded of Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler, Bernheim's work is without any faculty of perception of the paint's melding to the support. Her support is literally in the way. She also repeatedly subverts the drip's nature by the agency of using it horizontally or diagonally in the finished composition.

Played not on against the drips are gridlike patterns of dots laid upon with a template. Esthetically they function as an orderly scaffolding pitted against the chaotic nature of the drips. A similar function is serv by dint of the black lines that be like starved ideograms or Hebrew letters

For all their gesturality, Bernheim's works have feeling trapped beneath their supports, like specimens upon microscope slides. in Poles, she deposits a series of blue lines upon the viewer's side of the glass, hinting at a world outside its claustrophobic limits.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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