Dis[Locating] Culture: Contemporary Islamic Art in America
Co-curated by Reem Alalusi with Michael Berger
Group Exhibition: Negar Ahkami, Shiva Ahmadi, Jowhara AlSaud, Shoja Azari, Sandow Birk, Amir Fallah, Anoka Faruqee, Asad Faulwell, Farah Ossouli
Symposium: Keynote address by Reza Aslan
April 15 - July 30, 2011
We are living in a time of binary thinking and exclusionary conclusions. Based on manufactured boundaries between cultures, these barriers lead to ever more fear and mistrust. Mistaken notions about one another travel far and wide, sometimes carried by political and religious subtexts that inform both popular and 'high' culture.
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Naijun Zhang: The Examiner
Solo Exhibition
September 25, 2010 - March 12, 2011
Michael Berger Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of new work by artist Naijun Zhang. Zhang’s detailed paintings are an attempt to draw attention to the paths that cross in contemporary Eastern and Western representational painting, while critiquing the current Chinese social construct. Zhang studied painting during China’s cultural revolution and throughout the Post-Mao era. His technique is directly influenced by the Russian Beaux Arts Painting tradition and its continued role in modern Chinese painting.
In masterfully rendered scenes, he explores ideas of the self and identity by painting intimate moments from appropriated photojournalist imagery. Zhang’s body of work refers directly to the cultural rupture that occurred to him when transitioning his life from the East to the West. The paintings in this exhibition are intimate yet distant, capturing quiet moments of the every day. These technically exquisite works portray an instant where East and West merge together while maintaining their unique cultural aesthetics.