Untitled

1960 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Wallace Berman

location: California
year born: 1926
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Staten Island, New York

Wallace Berman was one of San Francisco’s more important avant-garde artists and is considered by many to have been the father of the Californian assemblage movement (a title he could probably dispute with Edward Kienholz). Characteristically unruly, Berman was an active member of the San Francisco and Los Angeles Beat communities in the mid-1950s. In 1963 he settled in Topanga Canyon and started to develop the body of work for which he would become most famous. The verifax machine, a precursor of the photocopy machine, lent the name to the series of collages with which Berman experimented until his death in 1976. The structural compositional element that unifies the series is the image, appropriated from a magazine, of a hand holding a transistor radio. By photocopying and reproducing the image in sequential form on top of the canvas, Berman mimics the pattern produced by an old film reel. Inside the frame of each radio, the artist superimposed imagery—people, objects and symbols, often taken from pop culture—pertinent to that particular sequence of the work.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Untitled (Shuffle)
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Wallace Berman

1969

While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...

27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978
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Bruce Conner

1978

In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...

EASTER MORNING
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Bruce Conner

2008

Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...

The Possibility of the Half
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Minouk Lim

2012

The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...

Untitled (Governor of Ohio Judson Harmon), Damaged series
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Lisa Oppenheim

2003

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

#17 Pink
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James Welling

2005

#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...

8 Ball Surfboard
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Alexis Smith

1995

In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...

Flower Tree
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Choi Jeong-Hwa

2008

The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle...

Back to mother
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Zai Kuning

2014

Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...

Stowe
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James Welling

2006

Welling employs simple materials like crumpled aluminum foil, wrinkled fabric and pastry dough and directly exposes them as photograms, playing with the image in the process of revealing it...

Untitled (San Francisco)
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Edward Kienholz

1984

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...

Shadows V, Set of 3
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Charles Gaines

1980

To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...

Office Work
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Walead Beshty

2018

Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...

Untitled (Miller House, #02)
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Luisa Lambri

2002

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...

Sunday (Domingo)
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Rivane Neuenschwander

2010

In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks...

Beyond Geography
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Li Ran

2012

In his video work Beyond Geography , Li dramatizes the role of the artist-as-imitator to the point of sheer parody...

Memorial for intersection #2
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Amalia Pica

2013

Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013)...