Adam Berg: Resonances features a bold new series of paintings and related polished stainless-steel sculptures. Conjures the speculative mapping of cosmological dimensions and simultaneously the microscope and invisible domains of the dynamic systems of life the dazzling round paintings each emit color like fields of energy. Created during the worldwide flux of past two years, the works are neither representational nor symbolic of any state of affairs in the world but are visually reminiscent of a multitude of worlds in various cosmic scales.
Building on the artist’s dedicated practice investigating the interrelationships of art and science, Berg conceives of painting as a means of introducing concepts of scientific investigations into wider audiences and conversations. Encapsulating the essence of this new body of work, Berg entitles this project Resonance suggesting the expanded field of reverberations which he seeks to draw into his work. Incorporating mathematical, scientific, computational, and topological ideas – and specifically Sheaf theory which establishes connections between local and global properties of topological space.
Although created with only vigorous brushwork and the repetitive concentric strokes of Berg’s brushes, the painting operates as lush plasmatic images of distant worlds or the rotating and entwining patterns constructed by the most complex of computational algorithms. Each of the paintings within the system is titled AGI or Auto Generative Images which is the artist’s playful restatement of the term Artificial General Intelligence or more commonly referred to as AI (Artificial Intelligence). For Berg each of the works is sentient in its creation.
The paintings command my attention to what they, as self-emergent agents, want to become as opposed to me as the intervening agent (i.e.. painter) is telling them what I want them to become. The painting reveals itself to me and to the viewer, and together we (artist and viewer) generate our meaning and connections which constitute a resonance with the painting.
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Adam Berg
AGI 11 (Auto Generative Image Series), 2022 Oil on Canvas
60 x 60 in
152.4 x 152.4 cm -
ADAM BERG
AGI 7 (AUTO GENERATIVE IMAGE SERIES), 2021
Oil on Canvas48 x 48 in
121.9 x 121.9 cmIn a parallel to Surrealist automatism, the method of artmaking in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, Berg considers each work as having autopoiesis, or the ability to create, maintain or renew itself which allow for each to establish its own visual agency. Berg reconstitutes the artistic power of objects to seize our imaginations and rekindle our innate, childlike sense of wonderment of the cosmos. Along with his mirror like sculptures which perform as scientific devises not unlike telescopes or microscopes, his radiant paintings invite us to awaken our perceptions and look into them and ourselves at new horizons.
Reza Negarestani, the contemporary Iranian philosopher and writer, upon observing Berg’s AGI paintings, has written that they are:
A navigation of the deep ends of the islands of perception and intelligence—alien or otherwise. In this navigation which always belongs to the paradigm of descent in the vein of the post-Copernican paradigm of cosmology, we soon find ourselves in the great fables of isolated islands where to be part of an island means to be part of a resonant field, to be able to hear the shape of the island by listening to the waves. And to be part of a resonant field means we are part of an ocean, i.e., the very system that carries the messages in bottles sub-rosa: We belong to that which is bottomless, that which gravitates us all towards a common end: to fall in the sky.
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Adam Berg
AGI 7 (Auto Generative Image Series), 2021 Oil on Canvas
60 x 60 in
152.4 x 152.4 cm -
Adam Berg's AGI paintings belongs to the realm of what mathematician and philosopher Gilles Châtelet has termed virtual mobilities, virtual not as inferior to the real motion but as potent ambiguations and allusions which escape the transcendental clutch of understanding. They propagate in the nebulous terrains between mathematics and physics, intuitions and concepts. Neither fully of mathematical origin, nor entirely citizens of physics, virtual mobilities are special classes of abstractions infected with mobile ambitions of physics, forms equipped with what in the Middle Ages were called subtle bodies often associated with specters, ghosts and the heavenly fauna, hollowed, and made of fire and air.
From Resonance Atoll by Reza Negarestani
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Adam Berg: Resonances
A New Documentary by Eric Minh Swenson Filmed in the Artist's DTLA Arts District Studio -
Adam Berg: Resonances Series Installation View
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Adam Berg
AGI 8 (Auto Generative Image Series), 2021
Oil on Canvas48 x 48 in
121.9 x 121.9 cmAdam Berg: Resonance On View Though June 3
Plan Your Visit & Two Special EventsResonance is installed at the Thomas Lavin Showroom (Suite B310) at the Pacific Design Center and curated by Edward Cella; the exhibition is available for viewing Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM and located at 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, CA 90069. No appoinmets are required.
For further assistance please contact Edward Cella by email director@edwardcella.com or telephone 323 525 0053.
Adam Berg At Home at the Thomas Lavin Showroom
Friday, April 29 from 3 to 5 PM
You are invited to join Adam Berg and the Thomas Lavin team for an informal gathering to celebrate the installation of Adam Berg: Resonances. The artist will be on hand to welcome viewing of his newest body of works and offer his personal insights. To RSVP, please register on Eventbright,
Reza Negarestani, Edward Cella and Adam Berg: In Conversation
Sunday, May 15, 2022 | 12 Noon (PST)
Join us for a live web-broadcast with philosopher Reza Negarestani from Connecticut; gallerist Edward Cella on location in Berlin, Germany; and artist and educator Adam Berg from Los Angeles for a discussion of Berg’s newest body of paintings and sculptures entitled Resonance. For further information or to RSVP, please register on Zoom.
