FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Updated May 3, 2013

Please note that dates and exhibition titles listed in this schedule may change. To confirm any information or for image requests, please call the BAM/PFA Communications Office at (510) 642-0365 or write bampfapress@berkeley.edu.


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Continuing
Himalayan Pilgrimage: Sacred Space
Through May 26, 2013

Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248
May 3 through July 14, 2013

The Reading Room
Ongoing

L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA
Ongoing

Opening
Rebar: Kaleidoscape
May 12, 2013 through December 2015

Ballet of Heads: The Figure in the Collection
May 17 through August 25, 2013

The 43rd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 17 through June 16, 2013

Hans Hofmann: Rectangles
June 5 through September 3, 2013

Gazing into Nature: Early Chinese Painting
June 5 through October 20, 2013

Deities, Demons, and Teachers of Tibet, Nepal, and India
June 26, 2013 through April 13, 2014

Zarouhie Abdalian / MATRIX 249
August 2 through September 29, 2013

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013
August 21 through December 8, 2013

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting
September 25 through December 22, 2013

Linda Stark / MATRIX 250
October 18 through December 22, 2013

The Possible
January 29 through May 25, 2014

Forrest Bess
June 11 through September 14, 2014

EXHIBITION DESCRIPTIONS


Continuing:
Himalayan Pilgrimage: Sacred Space
Through May 26, 2013

The third and final rotation of Himalayan Pilgrimage explores the theme of Sacred Space with a pair of magnificent large mandala paintings, two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional architectural space where a specific deity resides. Dating to the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, these paintings represent, in vivid colors, a cosmology of the deity Hevajra. Several other paintings on view depict historic teachers of various Tibetan orders.

Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248
May 3 through July 14, 3013

MATRIX 248 brings together approximately forty recent works produced by the New York–based artist Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965), who became prominent in the 1990s and has been steadfastly expanding dialogues surrounding painting and drawing ever since. Intermixing historical styles associated with American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, Eisenman infuses these familiar forms with her own incisive social commentary and aesthetic voice.

The first BAM/PFA exhibition organized by new Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator Apsara DiQuinzio, MATRIX 248 focuses on a selection of paintings and works on paper that were motivated by the economic crisis and lingering political instability that continue to cloud post-Bush-era America. Though her works directly address our current political and sociological reality, Eisenman goes beyond these concerns to explore universal themes of the human condition.

The Reading Room
Ongoing

The Reading Room celebrates the written word and the central part it plays in our lives. Books from several noted East Bay small presses are shelved side by side with cherished books left by visitors. Drop by to browse and view related artworks. Bring a favorite book to leave in exchange for one from the ever-changing collection. Read visitors’ notes on why they love the book they have contributed. Leave a note for someone else. On selected Fridays, the space becomes the site of RE@DS, our literary series dedicated to poetry and experimental fiction.

L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA
Ongoing

On most Fridays, BAM/PFA keeps its gallery doors open until 9 p.m. or later for L@TE, a series of innovative, interdisciplinary events incorporating art, literature, film, dance, and music. Launched in November 2009 as an experiment to test the boundaries of what a museum could offer, L@TE has garnered critical acclaim and promoted dynamic engagement with diverse audiences.

BAM/PFA relies on a rotating cast of guest programmers with wide-ranging backgrounds to curate Friday evening programming, occasionally in conjunction with a museum exhibition. Previous events have included participatory drumming sessions, silent film screenings with live musical accompaniment, poetry readings, traditional Balinese gamelan music, a day of “secret” events accessed by deciphering clues, kimchee-making and food workshops, fencing, student-curated DJ events, and a dance-and-draw party. Music programs, presented by foremost innovators in the field, respond to the particular sonic properties of the museum’s vast concrete atrium. Notable performers have included Terry Riley, Ellen Fullman, Joan Jeanrenaud, Devendra Banhart, William Winant, The Residents, Paul Dresher, and countless others.

During the summer of 2013, the Oakland-based Thingamajigs Performance Group serve as L@TE artists-in-residence. Thingamajigs uses instruments fashioned from made and found materials and often performs music with alternate tuning systems. With the help of audiences and local collaborating artists, the group investigates the meanings of travel, migrations, maps, and labyrinths in a series of linked performances, talks, installations, a workshop, and open rehearsals.

Opening:
Rebar: Kaleidoscape
May 12, 2013 through 2015

Kaleidoscape, by the San Francisco–based design firm Rebar, is the newest centerpiece of BAM/PFA’s expansive 7,000-square-foot central atrium Gallery B. Both a work of art and furniture, the sixty-piece modular sculpture is designed to be reconfigured spontaneously by visitors, who are encouraged to create customized environments for study, relaxation, or socializing. Together, the colorful sections may be used to create a crystalline pattern to be viewed from the upper galleries. The work may also function as a seating area for performances and events, including the regular L@TE: Friday Nights @ BAM/PFA series.

Ballet of Heads: The Figure in the Collection
May 17 through August 25, 2013

The human figure has been a locus of artistic innovation and expression since the earliest artworks. This focused presentation mines the BAM/PFA collection, bringing together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that demonstrate the inexhaustible variety and texture of the human form in art. Seeking to explore the polymorphous nature of the figure, Ballet of Heads puts into dialogue the Baroque canvases of Peter Paul Rubens, the romantic illustrations of William Blake, the American Regionalism of Reginald Marsh, the sharp angles and expressive contours of George Grosz and Max Beckmann, and the cultural critique found in caricature works by Honoré Daumier and Philip Guston.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure the work of Nicole Eisenman, whose works are spotlighted in a concurrent MATRIX exhibition, teasing out many of the threads found in her paintings and works on paper—a blending of seemingly oppositional categories such as Social Realism, abstraction, folk art, and popular comics—and contextualizing it in the process.

The 43rd Annual University of California, Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition
May 17 through June 16, 2013

Each year, BAM/PFA teams with the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice to present the works of graduating M.F.A. students. We are honored to present the work of six promising graduates as they embark on their careers—Dru Anderson, Dusadee Pang Huntrakul, Erin Colleen Johnson, Sahar Khoury, Jess Rowland, and Sean Talley.

Hans Hofmann: Rectangles
June 5 through September 3, 2013

Known for his bold use of color, innovative approach to materials, and dynamic compositions, Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) is perhaps most celebrated for paintings that use the rectangle as a primary motif. Loosely derived from Cubist approaches to defining form and space, Hofmann’s rectangles provide pictorial structure as well as a sense of motion, atmosphere, and mood. In Hofmann’s paintings of the 1950s and 1960s one can see in certain works vestiges of still life forms, architectural elements, or even landscape features. However, the predominant sensibility is abstract, with a clear focus on color and form as the primary elements of the pictures.

Featuring twelve works drawn exclusively from BAM/PFA’s unsurpassed collection of the Abstract Expressionist artist’s paintings, Rectangles also provides an opportunity for us to celebrate the completion of a comprehensive Hofmann painting conservation project, funded by The Renate, Hans, and Maria Hofmann Trust and Save America’s Treasures, a now defunct program of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, and executed by Alina Remba and the painting conservation team of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Gazing into Nature: Early Chinese Painting
June 5 through October 20, 2013

Gazing into Nature features a selection of BAM/PFA’s earliest Chinese paintings. These rare and amazingly well-preserved works by early landscape and bird-and-flower painters of the late Song and early Yuan periods (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), rendered on silk or paper with ink and light color, demonstrate the sophistication and accomplishment of the early Chinese painting tradition.

Early Chinese painters often depicted the natural world through a lens of gentle mists created with delicate brushwork. Whether capturing a refined corner of the universe, as in Ma Yuan’s thirteenth-century Plum Tree and Ducks by a Stream, or a single twisted branch of a grapevine, as in Wen Riguan’s thirteenth-century Grapes, it is the artist’s control of ink, wash, and line that brings the subject to life. Landscape painters, too, conveyed the beauty and grandeur of the natural world. Their interpretations were not intended to be of specific places rendered in realistic terms, but rather idealized landscapes of retreat and reclusion.

Deities, Demons, and Teachers of Tibet, Nepal, and India
June 26, 2013 through April 13, 2014

Joyful and sensual sculptural figures of Indian deities and dancers join radiant images of enlightened beings from Tibet and Nepal in Deities, Demons, and Teachers, which presents a rotating display of works by anonymous Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artisans. A tenth-century sandstone figure of Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity worshipped by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists, graces the entrance to the exhibition, a site appropriate to Ganesha’s role in removing obstacles and blessing any new endeavor.

Hindus and Buddhists both revere and celebrate female deities and often depict goddesses in idealized form with exaggerated marks of beauty. In Dancing Devi, a twelfth-century buff-sandstone sculpture from central India, the beauty of the bejeweled and crowned figure is accentuated by the larger-than-life proportions of breasts and buttocks. A more reserved but no less beautifully idealized feminine form is seen in Tara, a seventeenth-century Nepalese bronze, where the figure is surrounded by a fanciful garden of birds, musicians, and garlands.

Early images of the Buddha are rare so it is quite exceptional that in addition to the massive bronze fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddha in the center of the gallery, this exhibition also features a stone image of a third-century seated Buddha from the Swat Valley and a tenth- or eleventh-century bronze Standing Buddha from Western Tibet. An array of bodhisattvas and attendant deities from these regions fill out the gathered celestial realm of the Buddhist cosmology.

Zarouhie Abdalian / MATRIX 249
August 2 through September 29, 2013

Oakland-based artist Zarouhie Abdalian’s (b. 1982) work often responds to the specific attributes of a given location, architectural setting, or social landscape. Abdalian typically employs modest materials to produce subtle conceptual or formal effects that stage an alteration, or a shift of perception, within the immediate environment. Her work inspires careful examination of its surroundings, as it typically resides on the threshold of visibility. For her first solo exhibition in a museum, the artist has created a series of new sculptures specifically for Gallery A that explore the interrelated, yet distinct, states of noise, silence, and the absence of sound. In one she inserts a bell that rings continuously in a vacuum, so that while visible the sonorous effects are not audible. In another, hammers audibly articulate the sound and space of a hollow, opaque, and rectilinear shape. In these works she challenges what is perceptible and understood through multiple physical senses.

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013
August 21 through December 8, 2013

The first midcareer survey of the work of Yang Fudong presents films, multichannel videos, and photographs by one of the most important contemporary Chinese artists. The exhibition, which includes twenty years of Yang’s work, highlights his engagement with formal aspects of the construction of cinema and with film-noir aesthetics (an accompanying film series featuring the artist’s single-channel films as well as films that have influenced him will screen at the PFA Theater in the fall). Born in 1971 in Beijing, Yang reflects the ideals and anxieties of his generation, a generation born during and after the Cultural Revolution that is struggling to find its place in the rapidly changing society of the new China.

Yang’s films and film installations have an atemporal and dreamlike quality, marked by long and suspended sequences, dividing narratives, and multiple relationships and storylines. Many of his images recall the literati paintings of seventeenth-century China, made by artists and intellectuals who, faced with political suppression, pursued spiritual freedom by living in reclusion. Self-consciously evoking the literati, Yang calls his protagonists “intellectuals”; they are similarly confronted with the choice of participating in or abstaining from worldly affairs. In his series of photographs, for example, Yang brings the literati’s impassive attitude, emptied of any suggestion of agency or of the immediacy of experience, to the consumerist contexts of contemporary urban China: the fancy hotel room or restaurant, the swimming pool, the brothel. In other works Yang focuses instead on rural China, on the sense of isolation and loss as traditional villages are dissolved and communities scattered.

In his recent installations, Yang reflects on the process of filmmaking, creating spatially open-ended multichannel films that he calls a contemporary form of the Chinese hand scroll. These news works push further his theory that “anything which has been filmed can be shown.”

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting
September 25 through December 22, 2013

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting investigates a relatively unexamined area of Chinese art history: meiren (beautiful women) paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exhibition brings together approximately thirty paintings from public and private collections in the United States and Europe, as well as works from the BAM/PFA collection, in order to present a broad selection of this genre for the first time and to suggest new interpretations. Organized in collaboration with UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus James F. Cahill, one of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese painting. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that includes essays by Cahill, BAM/PFA Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White, Sarah Handler, and Chen Fongfong.

Linda Stark / MATRIX 250
October 18 through December 22, 2013

MATRIX 250 features the work of Los Angeles–based artist Linda Stark, and will be her first solo exhibition in a museum. The presentation showcases approximately twenty paintings made by the artist over the last two decades, highlighting her Adornment and Branded paintings, which conflate the surface textures of the painting with various aspects of the female body, primarily flesh. The artist drips and meticulously builds layers of thick oil paint in her modestly scaled works, the largest of which measure three feet square. The artist often spends several years building up the luscious surfaces of her tactile paintings, merging the temporal and material properties of oil paint.

The Possible
January 29 through May 25, 2014

The Possible will explore contemporary art practices that thrive at the intersection of fine art, craft, performance, and pedagogy. With a special focus on hybrid creative practices flourishing in the Bay Area, the exhibition will create a dynamic environment of making, learning, performing, and listening.

This major show will occupy four BAM/PFA galleries and feature artwork, craft objects, creative workspaces, and research materials. Over the course of the exhibition, artist-participants will engage in overlapping residencies of varying lengths, allowing the installation to evolve and grow as the project progresses. The exhibition will also include historical works selected for their influence on and resonance with current practice: the exhibition will contextualize current work in relation to the collaborative and interdisciplinary experiments of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College among other precedents.

The Possible is co-curated by Director Lawrence Rinder and Oakland-based artist and curator David Wilson, whose own practice involves organizing events and installations that bring artists into unique situations for collaborative encounters.

Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Visible
June 11 through September 14, 2014

Forrest Bess (1911–77) is a unique figure in the history of American art. For most of his career, Bess lived an isolated existence in a fishing camp outside of Bay City, Texas, eking out a meager living by selling bait and fishing. By night and during the off-season, however, he painted prolifically, creating an extraordinary body of mostly small-scale canvases rich with enigmatic symbolism. Despite his isolation, Bess was known to a number of other artists and championed by dealer Betty Parsons, who presented six solo shows of Bess works at her fabled New York gallery. Organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, Seeing Things Visible it is the first museum exhibition to focus on Bess’s work in over twenty years.

Bess taught himself to paint by copying the still-lives and landscapes of artists he admired, such as Vincent van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Beginning in early childhood, Bess experienced intense hallucinations that both frightened and intrigued him; in 1946, he began to incorporate images from these visions into his paintings. After discovering Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, Bess began to understand painting not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an end. By meticulously recording and studying the dream symbols captured in his artwork, Bess hoped to uncover their universal meaning.

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