Marina Berio
Bio
Marina Berio is a New York visual artist and recipient of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She works with drawings and photography to convey aspects of visual experience that are at once intimate and visceral. She has made family images printed in her own blood and using photographic negatives of spaces, objects and landscapes as charcoal drawings imbued with a subtle and profound materiality.
Berio studied photography, drawing, sculpture and art history and completed an MFA in photography at the Bard School in New York. She is the recipient of awards from the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, the New York Arts Foundation and the Aaron Siskind Foundation. Her recent exhibitions have been at Baxter Street/CCNY in New York; Galerie Miranda in Paris, France; OFF Triennale in Hamburg; and Shiro Oni Studio in Japan. She has also exhibited at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, Von Lintel Gallery, Smack Mellon and Artists Space in New York; Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art in Boston USA; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris; Otto Zoo and Acta International in Italy.
Berio is also a founding member of PAIN, an activist group founded by Nan Goldin.
Statement
“Family Matter” is a series of gum arabic prints made with blood. I am not interested in the anachronism of making images with a 19th century process long superseded by sharper and faster methods, but gum allows for a high level of flexibility. I have an almost alchemical belief in the meaning contained in physical materials, that when this peculiar form of power is introduced into the realm of the illusion of the photographic image, other levels of meaning become possible.
Father and son reading with their legs entwined or snacking by the river, begin to provoke each other and engage in a rough game of wrestling until one or both ends up injured. The inevitable progression from playfulness to real anger frustrates me as much as it fascinates me: probing, aggression and love all mingled and inseparable. As a mother, a creator, a vertex of the family triangle, I use my own blood to denote that I am bound to these men and involved in their routine, even though their behaviors are profoundly alien to me. As a photographer and observer, I play an invisible role in this staging; I am present but beyond the frame. The veracity of these family images is amplified by the presence of my own blood in their creation, although the bond that exists between people who love each other cannot really be photographed.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
