The George Krevsky Gallery takes great pleasure in announcing their fall kickoff exhibition, Helen Berggruen: Itinerant Regionalist, opening Thursday, October 7, and running through Saturday, November 30, 2010. The solo show, Berggruen's first in San Francisco since 1996, highlights landscapes in the Regionalist and Figurative tradition. More than 25 oil paintings and watercolors depicting views of Europe, the Midwest, and Northern California, are featured at the gallery located at 77 Geary Street in San Francisco.
Berggruen activates her canvases with vivid colors and vigorous brushstrokes. As a visual explorer, her images are realistic and detailed, but often rendered with flattened perspective. Whether it's a rocking chair, a farmhouse, or a haystack, she makes everyday objects and scenes come to life with a calming yet energizing sensibility. No matter the location—France, Iowa or Napa Valley—her work is inviting and intimate. Memories of European Masters, Van Gogh and Cézanne, blend with American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton and American Scene painter Charles Burchfield resulting in a fresh and unique vision and style.
A San Francisco native who graduated with a BA from Sarah Lawrence, Berggruen followed her own path. She performed with Robert Wilson's theater company in New York and Paris before turning to painting in the late 1970s. Her early career in theater undoubtedly impacts the expressive quality of her work in which objects dance on the canvas. Her art dances to what Berggruen calls, "the musical quality of those rolling hills: … silos, massive against the horizon when seen up close, punctuating the hillside in a kind of staccato sequence…dark green furrows cutting rhythmically through fields of corn still drying on the stalk."
Berggruen has exhibited internationally at Berggruen & Zevi in London, and Galerie Mutter Fourage in Berlin, and in the U.S. at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles, Friesen Gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the Elkader Art Center in Iowa. Her artwork is included in many important private and corporate collections including, Beringer Vineyards, Mr. & Mrs. Francis Ford Coppola, Mr. Paul & the Honorable Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, the General Electric Corporation, and the Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Iowa.