Depending on Glass
Stephanie Bernheim
GALLERY II & III
Stephanie Bernheim, UltraM (detail), 2022, acrylic paint on glass, 30 x 26 inches.
February 15 – March 16, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, February 15, from 6–8pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Depending on Glass, an exhibition of installation, sculpture, and painting by A.I.R. Alum Artist Stephanie Bernheim. Connecting the bodies of work on view is the material of glass, which the artist repurposes in a new installation and uses as a sculptural support and canvas for painting.
Throughout her career, Bernheim has explored experimental processes and used materials in unexpected ways. One evening, while Bernheim was making work at her farm in the countryside, there was a dramatic storm. Suddenly, the force of the wind carried a large glass sheet several hundred feet up a hill toward her house. The glass shattered and sprinkled like snow throughout the grass, producing an unexpected landscape. Bernheim retrieved the glass remains, gathering the shards for a future work. The installation on view brings these shards together with digital transfers of Polaroids taken by Bernheim of the initial shattering, as well as early drawings of mixed-media assemblages. In these drawings, bits of glass pile up to create colorful geometric delineations, conveying a multi-dimensional experience of glass.
The artist’s Early Relief works use glass panels as a support structure for considering the possibilities of acrylic paint as a sculptural material. Bernheim creates bodily paint “skins” by building up layers of acrylic paint on panels of glass. Over time, through methodic and experimental interventions, the acrylic bubbles, bends, curves, and contorts to create unexpected grounds. In these three-dimensional geological landscapes, paint becomes its own support and breaks free from the canvas. Bernheim has described her intention to form surfaces “where the earth’s crust and the crust of the painterly object might coincide.”
Concluding the exhibition are several works which extend the process of Bernheim’s Early Reliefs by transforming windowpanes into canvases for painting. In these glass works, repetitive drips of paint accrete in fine, multi-hued layers through which occasional contrasting color seeps through. Moreover, the thin layered build-up exposes the transparency and reflection of the glass grounds embedded within. Hung alongside these paintings are several Paint Skins, oval, square and circular in shape, which also reference the hues, dots, and drips of the previous windowpane paintings.
Depending on Glass surveys Bernheim’s use of a single medium across five decades. In various two- and three-dimensional forms, the artist demonstrates the possibilities of glass as an artistic material, while also suggesting more experiments are yet to come.
Stephanie Bernheim lives and works in New York. Bernheim graduated from Sarah Lawrence College (BA) and New York University (MA), where she studied with Milton Resnick, and studied with Ad Reinhardt at Hunter College. She has been affiliated with A.I.R. Gallery for over three decades. She was a New York Member of A.I.R. Gallery for seven years (1990–97), and in 1993, founded the A.I.R. Fellowship Program. Bernheim’s exhibitions in galleries and museums include P.S.1 Museum in Long Island City, Trisha Collin’s Grand Salon, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Franklin Furnace, Art Resources Transfer, Inc., The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and The Arts Club of Chicago. Her work is held in public collections such as The Yale University Art Gallery, The Milwaukee Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, The Princeton Museum, and The Arts Students League, along with many private collections. The book Stephanie Bernheim: From Paint to Pixels, a monograph by Kara L. Rooney (Foli Art Publ: London, New York, Brussels 2017), traces Bernheim’s career from 1978 – 2016.
View Stephanie Bernheim’s page here.
View the Press Release here.