Margot Bergman

Opens Friday, March 16, 2018, 6-8 PM

It is with utmost pleasure that Corbett vs. Dempsey announces Thank you for having me , an exhibition of new paintings by Margot Bergman.  This is the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery.

Bergman’s canvases are probing, sometimes disturbing investigations of an intense interior space projected outward.  They are often expressionistic on the verge of explosive, not simply in terms of the manner in which the paint is handled, but in the way that the most delicate and private and vicious elements of a psychological portrait are plunged into.  Since the early 1990s, when her work sharpened its fangs and honed its withering sense of humor, Bergman has painted figures, portraits – mostly, but not exclusively, women.  She has gradually ramped up the scale of the paintings, from intimate salon-sized works steeped in Surrealism to large canvases packed with action.  At times, the works are more minimal, only a few lines articulating the outline of a head; mostly, they are dense and multiform, with highly variable marks from tightly rendered to slashing to washes.  Her eye and hand combine in a sort of tough-love in these pictures.  Their brutality is often obvious, but underneath is a deep current of humanity, a tender quality, that plots them on a range from poignant to powerful.

Margot Bergman has been the subject of solo exhibitions in recent years at Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2016), and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles (2017), was seen in a solo booth presentation by CvsD at Art Basel 2017, and will be the subject of two solo museum exhibitions in Europe in the next year.