ELLEN BERKENBLIT @ Allentown Art Museum

Reveling in the translucency, glow, and grit of oils, Ellen Berkenblit pushes and bends paint to its limits, ever experimenting. Her forms and characters—powerful female figures along with their animal familiars—are a vehicle for line and color, drawing us in yet dissolving at close range. Berkenblit’s images evolve through the process of making, morphing out of the visual language she’s developed over many years of practice.

This exhibition, the accomplished artist’s first solo museum show, presents recent large-scale canvases and an immersive site-specific installation featuring Kozo collages and zine drawings.

About the artist:

Ellen Berkenblit has been exhibiting nationally and internationally to critical acclaim for forty years. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. Berkenblit is the recipient a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2013 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2018, the Drawing Center, New York, commissioned a film about her practice, and in 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago commissioned a site-specific mural by the artist for their Atrium Project. Berkenblit is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Vielmetter in Los Angeles, Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.