BERNARD MARTIN: It's Been Awhile
BERNARD MARTIN: IT'S BEEN AWHILE
June 8 - 29, 2024
Born in Ferrum, Virginia in 1935, Bernard Martin received his MFA at Hunter College in 1962 , and his BFA at RPI (now VCU) in 1959. He passed away Christmas Eve, 2021. He was a professor emeritus of art at Virginia Commonwealth University where he was the first chair of the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 1966 to 1999. He has also been faculty at the Studio Arts Center in Florence, Italy, as well as a research resident at the Cite Internationale des Arts, in Paris, France. He has been the recipient of two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and the Pollak Lifetime Achievement Award. Martin's work is part of several public collections including The Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, VA), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA). Martin’s work is also part of many private collections.
Martin had numerous solo exhibitions throughout his decades-long career, including three separate traveling exhibitions with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Other solo exhibitions have been with ADA Gallery (Richmond, VA), Lee Hansley Gallery (Raleigh, NC), Anderson Gallery (Richmond, VA) and the Virginia Beach Art Center (Virginia Beach, VA). From 1965 until his death in 2021, Martin exhibited in over 200 national and international group exhibitions, including Art of the South at Wall Street Gallery (New York, NY), Ministry of Culture Exhibition (Moldova, Russia), and Exhibition - USA at the Museo Pedro De Osma (Lima, Peru). His paintings inside of paintings, often coupled with text, reveal a deeper connection in the artist's psyche while also divulging his playful position about being an artist, the politics of the art world, and the illusions of representation.
"I work entirely in series. There is no signature style, no signature image: continuity comes from the direction and level of thought. Thematic and formal parameters are set before a series begins and during the one to two years a series takes, some, but not a lot, of evolution takes place. Our entire aesthetic, political, and social structures, and their histories, is considered a cultural landscape - an information age landscape - that I can walk into and select images that can be used in any manner that will further the work. Recent series have employed an extensive juxtaposing of images. This is simply an extension of the collage concept, which allows for not just non-linear thinking, but the suggestion of complexities not inherent in the individual components. Thus, the paintings can move very quickly between conviction to question; from stoic conceptualism to buffoonery; from high art concepts to popular art commercialism; and, most certainly in the comic series, from that which I believed as a kid to what I now believe."
-Bernard Martin
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