Paul Berger – Crosscut

October 4, 2018

Paul Berger, Mathematics #57, 1976-77, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches, $4000.

Paul Berger, Mathematics #57, 1976-77, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches, $4000.

Below is a review by Michael Upchurch of our current exhibit: Paul Berger – Multiplex for the weekly Culture round up at Crosscut: 6 things to do in Seattle published October 4, 2018.

Paul Berger: Multiplex

Seattle photographer Paul Berger has restless feelings about space — he likes to stretch it, fracture it, subvert it, play with it. In his verdant photo collage, Sum-11, Warp & Weft (2002), he divides a garden vista into 35 segments, with the same attendant gardener turning up in three of them. In Green Forest, Panorama and Lichen Forest, Panorama, both from 2009, his Cinemascope vistas of wooded landscapes each have a barely visible human present in them. Mathematics, a black-and-white series of gelatin silver prints from the 1970s, tend toward the abstract as they make a bracing visual fugue of blackboard-scrawled equations and formulae. Occasionally Berger strikes a political note. Double RR Puppet, Print Out (1984) is a distorted double portrait of Ronald Reagan with what looks like the peaks and plummets of a stock market chart behind him. Berger likes to slice and dice reality, just to see what he can make of it.

If you go: G. Gibson Gallery through Oct. 13. Artist talk Oct. 6 at 1 p.m.