thomas berding: field test

Exhibition Dates: september 3 - 28, 2019

Reception: Thursday, september 5, 6 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Field Test, an exhibition of recent work by Thomas Berding in the Main Gallery. This solo exhibition of paintings by Thomas Berding continues the artist’s mining of both the language of abstraction and digital and post-industrial refuse. Reclaiming images often overlooked in the deluge of information and surplus of material culture, Berding’s new work also represents an expansion of his painting practice through the incorporation of inkjet transfers and collage. Reflective of our chronically unsettled world, the paintings in this series possess an unmoored character that carry historical and personal memory while putting forth new streams of associations and cosmologies that both hint at the familiar and image a realm we could not preconceive of.

Thomas Berding was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Berding’s paintings have been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and NEA/Mid America Arts Alliance. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the University of Maine Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, and Oakland University in metro Detroit, which mounted a survey of the last decade of his work accompanied by a major catalog. Over his career, Berding has exhibited at many venues including the David Klein Gallery, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Rochester Institute of Technology, Indiana University, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum among many others. Thomas Berding currently lives and works in East Lansing where he is Professor of Studio Art at Michigan State University.  For more information on the artist, please visit thomasberding.com.