Marina Berio
"Family Matter"

Exhibition: 16 June – 28 July, 2018

Marina Berio uses the physical properties of photography and drawing to convey the complex, intermingled layers of her own life. Love, doubt, grief and solitude are expressed in her photographs and drawings that capture fleeting moments of intense emotion. Boundaries are blurred and what appear to be negative photographic images are in fact charcoal drawings; likewise, what appear to be life drawings are in fact photographs, printed using a 19th century process, gum bichromate, whose pigment – the artist’s own blood - lends a painterly aspect to the photographic image.

This is the series "Family Matter": Over five years the artist photographed her husband and young son alternately play, tease, wrestle and rest. In this series of 'family snapshots', the ballet of limbs captures the growing and changing relationship between father and son, in a recurring cycle of playfulness, irritation, anger and love, that is observed by the mother-photographer who is also the third point of this family triangle. In mingling her own blood with the photographic printing process Marina Berio signals the unique and authentic nature of the ‘blood ties’ that bind her not only the two wrestling males but to the ‘blood prints’ themselves, which by definition cannot be reproduced without her. The prints are of a small format (25,5 x 25,5 cm) that emphasises their personal, intimate nature. The exhibition will include several drawings by the artist, in dialogue with the photographic series.

Marina Berio (b. 1966, USA) is a visual artist from New York City. She studied photography, drawing, sculpture and art history in college, obtaining her MFA in Photography at Bard College. Marina Berio has been awarded grants by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and been invited to various residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay and Schloss Plüschow. She has exhibited at various art spaces internationally, including Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, Von Lintel Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, and Artists Space in New York; Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art in Boston; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris; and Otto Zoo and Acta International in Italy. Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York.

This exhibition completes the inaugural cycle at Galerie Miranda of exhibitions by women artists, initiated in March 2018 with "Early Color" by Jo Ann Callis (March-April) and "Blueprints" by Nancy Wilson-Pajic (May-June).

More information: www.marinaberio.net