Margot Bergman Degree of Separation

Press Release

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present Degree of Separation , its third solo exhibition of new work by Margot Bergman.

Bergman’s latest work extends her longstanding practice of collaborative paintings made with unknown partners. Using found canvases that she carefully hunts down and studies, Bergman then makes an intervention in the pre-exisiting image, sometimes quite minor, in other cases almost wholesale, transforming the piece into something completely new and unexpected. The results often have an eerie melancholic feel, sometimes gilded with a manic pop edge – in this case amplified by her choice of imagery, which in many of these new portraits is focused on a flop-eared creature. Rather than superimposing an image on top of the found ones, in this body of work Bergman often masks off parts of them, creating a kind of face-window in which the features (eyes, nose, mouth) are revealed as part of the underlying scene. The paintings’ cuddly surface is undercut by a layer of menace or unease, a sense of something being askew. This sensibility is also evident in Bergman’s new sculptural objects, which are being debuted in this exhibition. Uniformly bright red – hence their title “Red Hots” – these creatures strike poses that are difficult to pin down emotionally, but reside somewhere in the rift between cute and terrifying. Finally, a selection of Bergman’s penetrating miniature works on paper, which are also executed on found materials, is presented in the context of the larger canvases and sculptures.

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