Stephen Berens
Steven Berens, co-founder of X-TRA magazine, creates photographs, drawings, paintings, video, sculpture, and site-specific installations that revolve around generative systems. Each work is enveloped in a structure within which the artist seeks unpredictable results. Berens is slightly obsessive—he often works in series, looking for a particular language that he observes and seeing where it takes him. In various projects he has photographed everyone who knocked on his door over the course of several months, captured a pet owner’s anxiety with images of a single “lost dog” flier posted in over seventy locations around Los Angeles, and compared Sigmund Freud’s linguistic habits in The Ego and The Id to his own MFA thesis. Revisiting older work as raw materials emphasizes Beren’s interest in exploring how regularity might produce unexpected results or surprising visual connections.
Berens has exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, Sheldon Memorial Art Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia, among others. He was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The artist has also been granted a number of residences including the Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship in …
Steven Berens, co-founder of X-TRA magazine, creates photographs, drawings, paintings, video, sculpture, and site-specific installations that revolve around generative systems. Each work is enveloped in a structure within which the artist seeks unpredictable results. Berens is slightly obsessive—he often works in series, looking for a particular language that he observes and seeing where it takes him. In various projects he has photographed everyone who knocked on his door over the course of several months, captured a pet owner’s anxiety with images of a single “lost dog” flier posted in over seventy locations around Los Angeles, and compared Sigmund Freud’s linguistic habits in The Ego and The Id to his own MFA thesis. Revisiting older work as raw materials emphasizes Beren’s interest in exploring how regularity might produce unexpected results or surprising visual connections.
Berens has exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, Sheldon Memorial Art Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Russia, among others. He was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The artist has also been granted a number of residences including the Hambidge Distinguished Fellowship in 2015 and a Nida Art Colony Residency in 2012, among others.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York
The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois
Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France