KQED | Tehran: Public Lives Private Spaces | April 2010 | Shuka Kalantari
The public sphere in Iran is laden with restrictions implemented by the Islamic Republic: women must cover their hair outdoors; couples, unless married, cannot hold hands or be affectionate in the streets; no dance clubs; no live concerts with female performers... the list seems endless. The current exhibition at Berkeley's Alphonse Berber Gallery, Tehran: Public Lives Private Spaces -- New Art and Digital Media from Iran is a series of photographs and video installations depicting these restrictions on public life -- and the defiant private lives of young people in Iran's capital city. Most of the work was created by Tehran-based artists born after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.More...
Roaming in the Gloaming | February 2010 | Dewitt Cheng
Things go great, we get cocky, and then the gods smite the economy. Works That Disturb the Moonlight, the poetic title of this show, invokes the shadow that underlies the daytime world and the rational mind, and it's an apt description of the ethos of these eight young artists Angie Crabtree, Julia C. S. Davis, Igor Josifov, Kadet Kuhne, Annie McKnight, Joshua Martinez, Maja Ruznic, and Kim Ye who undoubtedly consider rationality of the Wall Street variety somewhat less grand than advertised. More...
New Images' is a fresh twist on 1959 event | December 2009 | Kenneth Baker
"New Images of Man and Woman" at the Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley commemorates an exhibition organized 50 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Peter Selz, now UC Berkeley professor emeritus of art history. Selz also made the present selection with gallery co-director Cameron Jackson. current show's very title marks the cultural distance between today and the time when "man" meant humankind. It also echoes the slight edge in number of female artists over men among the nine represented, a dramatic revision of the preponderance of men in the 1959 event. We might suspect political correctness afoot, were not most of the women's work so persuasive. Frances Lerner - a Bay Area painter "emerging" in her 60s - counts as the great discovery here. Using a found doll as a figural prop, she stages mysterious, carefully crafted pictures that offer up seemingly abandoned stabs at narrative. The fragment of homily that titles "Apple Doesn't" (2008) nicely chimes with all her pictures' sense of spent or dispirited action, as do the industrial age tools that appear in some of them. More...
Review for Bedri Baykam | December 2009 | Art in America
In 1987 -- six years after Douglas Crimp resoundingly announced that with the advent of postmodernism, painting had reached its endpoint-- Bedri Baykam exhibited a painting that read "This has been done before." In addition to this preemptive strike against his medium's critics, Baykam protested curatorial biases against non-Western art in a painting on which he wrote, "Modern Art is a Western Fait Accompli" (1984). But Baykam, a Turkish artist born in 1957 in Ankara, has exhibited widely and often since 1963, when, hailed as a prodigy, he was given shows in several cities in Europe and the U.S. More...
Figuratively Speaking at Berber Gallery | December 2009 | Jennifer Modenessi
In an essay accompanying the catalog of Alphonse Berber Gallery's current exhibit, "New Images of Man and Woman," gallery owner Cameron Jackson says the work of Bay Area painter Nathan Oliveria transformed his view of the human figure. Struck by Oliveira's stark and atmospheric depictions of the body - which he first encountered in a book some years ago - Jackson writes the figure became for him "something more than human." It's a fitting description for the spirit behind dozens of paintings and sculptures filling the Berkeley art space. Co-curated by noted art historian Peter Selz, "New Images of Man and Woman" takes a fresh look at artists whose paintings and sculptures fall under the banner of Bay Area Figurative Art, a mid-20th century movement in which artists strove to go beyond the representational, and captured their subject's emotional, psychological and spiritual states. The exhibit, one of the young gallery's most impressive to date, brings together work by three of the movement's most noted artists and a handful of younger painters and sculptors.... More...
Back to the Future | December 2009 | DeWitt Cheng
In 1959, during the Cold War, when the joys of consumerism and the fear of communism struggled in the American psyche, the art historian and curator Peter Selz curated a show entitled New Images of Man at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Featuring works influenced by French existentialism and American abstract expressionism, the exhibition explored doubt, angst, absurdity, and alienation, its redoubtable roster including, among others, Bacon, de Kooning, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Golub, Pollock, and the Californians Nathan Oliveira and Richard Diebenkorn. While many praised the uncompromising "tragic humanism," others found the show disturbing, and the art world soon turned away from such introspective brooding toward pop, op, minimalism, and other styles more celebratory of the arsenal of democracy and capitalism... More...
Alphonse Berber Gallery Opens on Bancroft | Peter Selz | July 02, 2009
A spirited new gallery opened recently on Bancroft Way in the former J. Goode men's clothing store, which was designed by Julia Morgan. The new owners had the good sense to retain the fine mahagony racks which are now used as frameworks for showing paintings. The space was launched with an innovative group exhibition that included amazing kinetic sculptures by Margolin. More...
Ominum Gatherum | DeWitt Cheng | May 2009
Lean times or not, new galleries are still opening. Berkeley's new Alphonse Berber Gallery features, in its second show, a 21-artist extravaganza of more than one hundred artworks in drawing, painting, photography, mixed media, sculpture, video, installation, jewelry, and fashion. With that diverse smorgasbord, the works are understandably arranged somewhat haphazardly among the three galleries, so it can be a bit confusing. Nonetheless, the casual visitor will find plenty to peruse, only a fraction of which can be discussed here.
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Best New Art Gallery | Ethan Fletcher | July 2009
Jessica Cox and Cameron Jackson, cofounders of Berkeley's Alphonse Berber Gallery, are the kind of overachievers who can make you feel like a slacker. The Piedmont couple are in their early twenties, yet this February, they opened a contemporary art space near the UC Berkeley campus after convincing well connected art collector Alphonse Berber to lend his name and expertise to the project.
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New Gallery Opens | March 2009 | Laura Casey
When Jessica Cox and Cameron Jackson opened the doors to the Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley late last month, neither seemed prepared for the response they got. More than 1,600 people poured through the gallery's doors opening night, according to the numbers by Cox and Jackson's two doormen tasked with counting bodies at the gallery's unveiling. The 7,200-square-foot space, showing several artists in an exhibition titled "New Nature," was packed with Cal students, art lovers and curious passers-by, many of whom talked about how Berkeley needed a space like this for artists to show their work.
Berber chose to pair with Jessica Cox and Cameron Jackson to open and run the Alphonse Berber Gallery, "I trust them very much," Berber says. Berber says that he also works with the young students, not despite of their age, but because of it. "I have always looked to freshness, new perspectives," he says. "Age is not so much a concern. It is, do they have the eye and the talent? Cameron and Jessica have this."
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