Night Gallery is pleased to announce Loony Tombs, a solo exhibition of paintings by Michael Berryhill. The exhibition will be his first in Los Angeles. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, November 19, and the exhibition will remain on view through December 22.
Roving contour lines weave through Berryhill’s paintings like flashlight beams, in pursuit of whatever it is they are already beginning to delineate. Color backlit by canvas or linen gradually becomes light of day, notions of time and place emerge, as do bits of recognizable imagery—the formation of these moments is possibly incidental, though their presence is no accident. Line and color behave as though trying to remember a smoky vision dreamed just after waking, or an obscure cartoon seen years ago.
Color’s role here to evoke sensation, as well as to process it—though not utilitarian by any means, Berryhill’s paintings are remedial. His search for the moment when a painting develops an undeniable inner animus, a presence that demands acknowledgement, is rooted in a fundamental human desire for experiencing objects firsthand— as Berryhill puts it, the part of being human that is worth fighting for.
Michael Berryhill (b. 1972, El Paso, TX) received his BFA at the University of Texas (Austin, TX) and his MFA from Columbia University (New York, NY). He has held solo exhibitions at KANSAS (New York, NY); Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY); and Okay Mountain (Austin, TX). Berryhill’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, at Kate Werble Gallery (New York, NY); Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder (Vienna, Austria); and Lulu (Mexico City, Mexico), among others. Writing on his work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and The New York Times, among other publications. Berryhill lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.