Frank Bernarducci

Last updated

Frank Bernarducci (born September 23, 1959) is a New York City art dealer and curator. He is currently the owner of Bernarducci Gallery, located at 525 West 25th Street in New York, NY. Bernarducci began exhibiting Graffiti art in the 1980s in the East Village while being the director of Frank Bernarducci Gallery. Bernarducci continues to curate exhibitions featuring emerging and seasoned artists. His gallery is known for exhibiting realist and Photorealist art. [1]

Contents

Education and early career

Bernarducci attended the School of Visual Arts from 1979 to 1982 and received his bachelor's degree in media arts, specifically graphic design and advertising, working as an advertising art director while still at school. [2] While at SVA, Bernarducci also minored in film, living in a loft on East 17th Street off Union Square, a half block from Andy Warhol's factory. In 1979 Bernarducci serendipitously met Warhol, who agreed to a cameo appearance in his first student film, causing a sensation when the film was screened at the school's amphitheater. While still in college in the early 1980s, Bernarducci was a frequent denizen at art openings in the East Village as well as at downtown nightclubs, most notably the Mudd Club, Pyramid, Kamikaze, Area, and Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager's Palladium. He and his good friend Mark Moskin curated painting exhibitions at some of these late-night venues. [3]

Bernarducci's art career was largely influenced by his father, Frank Sr., who was a painter and a student of the Hans Hofmann School of Art. [3] Frank Sr. was also a founding member of the Phoenix Gallery, established in 1958 among the 10th Street co-op galleries at the height of the abstract expressionist movement known as The New York School. [4] [3]

In 1984 Bernarducci held the first art exhibition in his loft, curated by Steven Kaplan, and featuring a dozen East Village painters, including David Wojnarowicz. Encouraged by the success of this exhibition, Bernarducci followed in his father's footsteps, opening the Frank Bernarducci Gallery. [5] In subsequent exhibitions, other notable artists included Ronnie Cutrone, Keith Haring, Daze, and Martin Wong. [3]

Frank Bernarducci Gallery went on to hold regular hours and monthly exhibitions, including "Urban Abstraction," the first gallery exhibition exclusively dedicated to the abstract work-on-canvas of pre-eminent graffiti artists. The artists – AJ, Bama, Bando, Cas, Duster, Ero, John 156, Rick Prol, Rammellzee, Koor, Prins, Spank, Seen, Stan, TB, Toxic and Vulcan – where all masters of the aerosol paint can. They abstractly employed the visual themes of their graffiti art to explore new ground. At the opening, graffiti artists from across New York mixed with East Village artists and other guests. Frank recalled his studio visit to Rammellzee's big, empty TriBeCa loft where the artist had laid his paintings flat on the floor all the way around the room. The only other things in the loft were a low wooden table with three chairs and a bottle of Tabasco sauce sitting on the table. Throughout the visit Ram sipped deliberately from the bottle of Tabasco. The 'afterparty' was a free-for-all at Nightclub Inferno. In 1986, Frank curated an exhibition titled "Photosynthesis," which featured painters whose work incorporated photography in some way. The highlight of the show was four, two-foot dollar sign paintings by Andy Warhol. The first weekend after the opening, a call came from Leo Castelli Gallery saying that Andy Warhol was dead. Unless already sold, they asked that the paintings be returned immediately after the show's closing. Retail price of these works at that time was $6,500. [3]

With the success of gallery artist Stephen Hannock and others, Bernarducci was able to move the gallery to the trendy 560 Broadway building in SoHo. [6] The inaugural exhibition featured the hand-painted photographs of photographer Ariadne Getty, the granddaughter of J. Paul Getty. Many of her celebrity friends attended the opening, including Bianca Jagger, Michael J. Fox and Brooke Shields. Fox's agent refused to allow his picture to be taken next to Shields because she stood over a foot taller, so he hung out in the back room opening beer bottles for everyone on the edge of the file cabinet. [3]

Galleries

Throughout the 1990s Bernarducci worked as director of two important realist galleries, Tatischeff and Co and Fischbach Gallery, both on 57th Street. There he represented the paintings of John Stuart Ingle, Jane Wilson, Leigh Behnke, Lois Dodd and many others, including G. Daniel Massad, whom he continues to represent.

In September 2000, Frank Bernarducci opened Bernarducci Meisel Gallery at 37 West 57 Street in New York. The Gallery's mission was to exhibit the foremost contemporary Realist artists. [7] Bernarducci curated many notable exhibitions at the Gallery, including 2008's "Painted Faces: Post Modern Portraits," which included many fine realist artists such as Mel Ramos, Chuck Close, Antonio Lopez, Alberto Vargas, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and many more. [8] [9] "The New York Project" (2011) included paintings by artists such as Richard Estes, Ron Kleemann, and Raphaella Spence. [10] In addition, Bernarducci curated an exhibition of artists belonging to the Sicilian group Il Gruppo di Scicli in 2012. This was the group's first exhibition in the United States. [7]

In 2010, under Bernarducci's guidance, the gallery moved to the third floor of the same building, expanding to twice its former size. [11] Upon its relocation, the gallery became the first LEED Certified Art Gallery in New York City. [7]

In 2017, Bernarducci opened a project space, Bernarducci Gallery Chelsea, specializing in Precisionist realism. In September 2017, an exhibition featuring artists Ester Curini, Hubert DeLartigue, Max Ferguson, Park Hyung Jin, Sylvia Maier, Sharon Moody and Nathan Walsh, among others, inaugurated the new venue. [12] On March 1 2018, Bernarducci Gallery relocated to its permanent location at 525 West 25th Street.

Film and TV

In 1987, Steven Spielberg and director Matthew Robbins selected the Frank Bernarducci Gallery artist Joe Davis for their film, Batteries Not Included. Spielberg chose Joe Davis's paintings to represent the East Village art scene, of which Bernarducci was a well-known figure. The story line paralleled the real-life story of the artist, who was being evicted from his studio to make way for development. [13]

In 2012, Bernarducci appeared as himself in two episodes of Bravo TV's reality series "Gallery Girls," a show about seven young women starting out in the New York art world. Both episodes were filmed on location at the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in Manhattan. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Michel Basquiat</span> American artist (1960–1988)

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fab Five Freddy</span> American artist

Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He gained wider recognition in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photorealism</span> Genre of art

Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer to a specific art movement of American painters that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Events from the year 1962 in art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rammellzee</span> American rapper

Rammellzee was a visual artist, gothic futurist graffiti writer, painter, performance artist, art theoretician, sculptor and a hip-hop musician from New York City, who has been cited as "instrumental in introducing elements of the avant-garde into hip-hop culture".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gagosian Gallery</span> Contemporary and modern art gallery with multiple locations

The Gagosian Gallery is a modern and contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most well-known artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2024, Gagosian employs 300 people at 19 exhibition spaces – including New York City, London, Paris, Basel, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong – designed by architects such as Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Annabelle Selldorf.

Tony Shafrazi is an American art dealer, gallery owner, and artist. He is the owner of the Shafrazi Art Gallery in New York City who deals in artwork by artists such as Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, and David LaChapelle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Bell (painter)</span> American painter

Charles Bell was an American photorealist who created large scale still lifes.

Dan Christensen, was an American abstract painter He is best known for paintings that relate to Lyrical Abstraction, Color field painting, and Abstract expressionism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Neffson</span> American painter (born 1949)

Robert Neffson is an American painter known for his photorealistic street scenes of various cities around the world, museum interiors and for early still lifes and figure paintings.

RISK, also known as RISKY, is a Los Angeles–based graffiti writer and contemporary artist often credited as a founder of the West Coast graffiti scene. In the 1980s, he was one of the first graffiti writers in Southern California to paint freight trains, and he pioneered writing on "heavens", or freeway overpasses. He took his graffiti into the gallery with the launch of the Third Rail series of art shows, and later created a line of graffiti-inspired clothing. In 2017, RISK was knighted by the Medici Family.

Raphaella Beatrice Spence is a British photorealist and hyperrealist painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Kaufman</span> American pop artist (1960–2010)

Steven Alan Kaufman was an American pop artist, fine artist, sculptor, stained glass artist, filmmaker, photographer and humanitarian. His entry into the world of serious pop art began in his teens when he became an assistant to Andy Warhol at The Factory studio, who nicknamed him "SAK". Kaufman eventually executed such pieces as a 144-foot-long canvas which later toured the country.

Art in the Streets was an exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles from April 17 to August 8, 2011. Curated by its then-director Jeffrey Deitch and associate curators Aaron Rose and Roger Gastman, it surveyed the development of graffiti and global street art from the 1970s to the present, covering the cities of New York City, the West Coast, London, and Sao Paulo with a focus on Los Angeles. It was supposed to travel to the Brooklyn Museum from March 30 to July 8, 2012. The exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled because of financial difficulties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl Kelley</span> American painter

Cheryl Kelley is an American painter known for her photorealism, especially her paintings of classic and muscle cars. Her work has been featured on the cover of Harper's Magazine and can be seen at the Scott Richards Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, California, the Bernarducci·Meisel Gallery in New York City, New York, and the Seven Bridges Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2009 and 2011 she was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize, and in 2012 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The art collectors' resource Artsy considers her one of ten "Masters of Photorealism".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph La Piana</span> American painter

Joseph La Piana is an American artist based in Brooklyn.

Nathan Walsh is a contemporary realist painter living and working in Wales, United Kingdom. While he paints in his studio in Wales, he travels abroad to large cities like New York to research his compositions.

<i>Jean-Michel Basquiat</i> (Warhol) 1982 painting by Andy Warhol

Jean-Michel Basquiat is a painting created by American artist Andy Warhol in 1982. Warhol made multiple silkscreen portraits of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat using his "piss paintings."

Paige Powell is an American photographer, curator, art consultant, and animal rights activist. Powell was the public affairs director of the Portland Zoo before she moved to New York City in 1980. Between 1982 and 1994, she worked at Interview magazine. She started out selling advertising and eventually became the associate publisher. As Andy Warhol's close friend and confidante, she became immersed in the 1980s New York City art scene. Since returning to her native Portland in 1994, she has split her time between working on art projects and supporting animal charities.

References

  1. Menendez, Didi (Fall 2010). "Frank Bernarducci" (PDF). Poets & Artists. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-09-24. Retrieved 2014-06-17.
  2. Challis, Clive (2005). Helmut Krone. The Book. Graphic Design and Art Direction (concept, form and meaning) after advertising's creative Revolution. Cambridge, UK: The Cambridge Enchorial Press. p. 235. ISBN   0-9548931-0-7 . Retrieved 2014-06-17.
  3. "Frank Bernarducci Sr., Executive, 65". New York Times. 10 May 1990. Retrieved 2013-02-10.
  4. "Art Week Offers a Wide Selection: Frank Bernarducci, Phoenix Gallery". The New York Times. 20 November 1960. Retrieved 2013-02-06.
  5. Robinson, Walter (7 February 2013). "Kicked Out of 1993". New York Observer. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  6. Bernarducci, Frank (1 January 2008). Painted Faces: Post Modern Portraits. New York, NY: Bernarducci Meisel Gallery. Retrieved 2014-06-17.
  7. Johnson, Ken (29 February 2008). "Art Review: Works On Paper. On a Treasure Hunt, Uncovering Modern Wonders". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-06-17.
  8. Bernarducci, Frank (1 September 2011). The New York Project. New York, NY: Bernarducci Meisel Gallery. ISBN   978-0-9833410-5-5 . Retrieved 2014-06-17.
  9. "TheArtTrade.com presents Frank Bernarducci". TheArtTrade.com. 29 December 2010. Retrieved 2013-02-06.
  10. "Frank Bernarducci to Open New Gallery in Chelsea". Artforum. 12 September 2017.
  11. Stanley, Mieses (5 January 1987). "Art Beat: Saved by Spielberg?". New York Magazine. pp. 16–18. Retrieved 2013-02-21.
  12. Chloe, Wyma (1 October 2012). "Gallery Girls Recap: Bravo Bangs Its Puppets Together But Fails to Create Sparks". Blouin ArtInfo. Louise Blouin Media. Retrieved 2013-02-21.