Timothy Bergstrom

Timothy Bergstrom is an abstract painter whose additive process builds but does not erase. In the cracks and fissures of his surface you see layer on layer of glitter and glue, like a studio floor inverted on the wall. These paintings are meant to be explored up close, forming an intimacy between the viewer and the work. “By zooming in and breaking down painting’s material and intrinsic elements, I aspire to create a dissonant relationship between painting and music. I look to develop pictures separate from painting's history of representation, Modernism’s flatness, and different from that of the photographed or digitally produced image,” states the artist.

His 2014 exhibition at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY, “Moon Milk: Part 1,” takes its title from the mythical substance in Italo Calvino’s short story “The Distance of the Moon,” a coveted glop fermenting on the Moon, which, eons ago, hung just above the Earth’s crust. That sticky terrain was the site of transformation: the decay of earthly matter and its recomposition as prized delicacy. Manifesting Bergstrom’s own version of this glop, the wire-formed crevices on his canvases are filled with screws, brushes, bottle caps, pastry tips, sandpaper, tape, and tissue, held in place by thousands of viscous threads of acrylic paint.

Bergstrom’s work has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as The New Britain Museum of Art in Connecticut and Indiana State University in Bloomington.

Courtesy of Halsey McKay Gallery