My Favorite Paintings at Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive

BAMPFA, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley, with a proclaimed mission to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film. 

One of the most striking paintings I saw in their inaugural exhibition at the new downtown location was 4 Brushstrokes over Figure by Hyun-Sook Son, a painting of a woman half-hidden behind a gauzy white curtain on the left half of the painting, contrasting greatly to the very dark background on the right, bound together by a perhaps broom held by the protagonist. The painting invoked essence of traditional Korean paintings or perhaps the golden age porcelains, with its sparseness and cleanness and the light-handed and deft rendition. There was a great sense of mystery and somewhat sadness to a very ordinary yet almost ritualistic chapter of life. In front of this near monochromatic painting, people felt like eavesdropping and automatically be hushed by its overwhelming quietude.


4 Brushstrokes over Figure, Hyun-Sook Song

For a contrast, my second favorite was a combustive color burst — Summer Bliss (1960) by Hans Hofmann, whose initial donations kickstarted the founding of this museum. This wonderful pure abstract featured bold color blocks, primarily in red, yellow and blue, over a large expanse of green. The most striking part was the color contrast and harmony, and above all, the kineticism of the painting, a overwhelming sense of constant movements as all those colors and color blocks seemed forever shifted, pulsated and moved in many directions, according to the relationships of adjacent colors and shades, and ultimately formed a great choral symphony, full of combustive life and energy.


Summer Bliss, 1960, Hans Hofmann

My Favorite Museum Collection Series
>> My Favorite Museum Collection Series 145: My Favorite Artefacts at Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley
<< My Favorite Museum Collection Series 143: My Favorite Paintings at Art Institute of Chicago

List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited

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Swedish Artist Cecilia Edefalk at Berkeley Art Museum

For the past thirty plus years, Berkeley Art Museum has curated more than 220 MATRIX exhibitions to actively engage with living artists since the program's inception in 1978. In the Museum's new location, Matrix 261 (June 20 - October 16, 2016) showcases an amazing Swedish artist Cecilia Edefalk, whose personal and moving employment, reinterpretation, and reinventing of daily objects of growth and decay, manifested in her sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs, were touchingly melancholic, achingly beautiful, and strangely comforting.

The most eye-catching objects were a 2008 group titled "Minne", birch branches in various shapes and shades, made of silver nitrate on bronze, whose sheen and rust emitted an otherworldly beauty.













A group of classical mask replicas, based on Roman marble mask of Marcus Aurelius, infused with twigs and leaves in various shapes and formations, formed the second large group of the exhibition.  Those unusual "crowns" made these masks stranger looking, and we suddenly sensed something hidden beneath those perfect and immobile faces.













The balance of the exhibition included a single birch branch in a corner of the large hall - "Weeping Birch Stem", which invoked a palpable sense of loneliness.





She also gave us something whimsical such as a "Birch Shoe" and a three-dimensional frame made of birch "branches" below, though the "Birch Show" was also echoed in a poignant painting, titled "Weeping Birch Mother". Even laughter mixed with tears.


Birch Shoe, Bronze, gold leaf, 2010, & Weeping Birch Mother, Oil on linen, 2010



Some pieces on canvas generated perhaps less buzz, but they were just as valuable and more instructive as they demonstrated the breadth of her works and her methods behind those fascinating sculptures, with the insights "behind the scene" offered in this 2010 piece of tempera and charcoal of birch wood on linen, "Weeping Birch Shadow".



A 2002 series of 12 oil and acrylic on linen paintings, "To view the painting from within", illustrated how she approached those fantastic masks.







A series of a 2016 tempera on linen painting, " The Meadow," were also quite interesting.



Cecilia Edefalk didn't strive for faddish, self-conscious avant-garde status or shock value so often plagued contemporary art; she dived deep into her private world full of feelings and background stories, which she generously shared with us, and we responded in kind.


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New Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive Opened

Last week, UC Berkeley's Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive opened its new building to guest.  Thursday was the gala opening day for donors; Friday, opening day for students; Saturday for members of the Museum/Archive; and Sunday, a community open house. 

I visited the Museum on 30 January, Saturday and it was nice to see so many members and their families and friends exploring the space and artworks on display.  The place was full of excitement and high energy but the visitors didn't overwhelm the quite airy space.  Comparing to the old site, this one was slicker and had more conventional gallery layout, thus easier to mount exhibitions.  Because the Museum did not exhibit their usual collections at the opening exhibition, it was hard to gauge how much the exhibition space had changed.  Once the the permanent collections are back, visitors might be able to understand it better.

















The initial exhibition had many exciting works and here are a handful of the highlights:



Architecture models






Macadamia wood bowl


Ruth Asawa


Solitary, semi-social mapping of ESO-510 613 connected with intergalactic dust by one Nephila clavipes - one week - and three Cyrtophora citricola - three weeks, spider silk, glue, paper, ink, Tomas Saraceno


Spider silk installation




4 Brushstrokes over Figure & 21 Brushstokes, Hyun-Sook Song


4 Brushstrokes over Figure, Hyun-Sook Song


21 Brushstrokes, Hyun-Sook Song


2 Brushstrokes, Hyun-Sook Song

In case one forgot, this picture below reminded people that we were in the quirky Berkeley:



There were two movie theater to showcase amazing collections of Pacific Film Archive (PFA) - one medium sized and a smaller one perhaps built for art house movies, in which I saw a wonderful short, featuring a woman in Baroque dress and modern sunglasses, running around in and around fountain and gardens, underneath an extravagant hat of a fountain:



A very promising beginning.

On Sunday, it was reported that some UC Berkeley students protested at the museum, "protesting the campus’s decision to designate funds to the creation of an art museum rather than to increase benefits for campus workers."

I do support some of their arguments; yet, I cannot agree with their Leninist and Maoist approach. Universities have societal obligations to stimulate minds and art museum is one of the very useful tools for such an endeavor.


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