Elegy, 2020

Emily Berger  

Emily Berger is an American abstract painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings are minimal and gestural, revealing in process and celebrating the hand of the artist. Berger is a member of American Abstract Artists. After graduating from Brown University, Berger earned her MFA in Painting from Columbia University, and attended the Skowhegan School in Maine. She has lectured extensively and participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Norte Maar Adirondacks outpost. Berger has exhibited internationally in numerous galleries and museums. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Drawings and Prints, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Library Special Collection, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art Library; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Delaware Art Museum, among others. Berger works with oil paint on wood panels. She layers paint in gestural, horizontal swaths from left to right, stacking the horizontal bands from top to bottom of the surface. An interplay of complementary colors creates a sense of push pull, endowing her compositions with nuanced luminosity. Scraping and scumbling the layers of paint, Berger gives her paintings a textured, painterly, material presence. She describes her method as being in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism—as if an event is taking place in the arena of the painting. Her approach, however, is quite controlled. Despite its structural reliance on the grid, the interplay between planning and the emergence of accidents lends the work a feeling of energy and mystery.