David Berkowitz Chicago on the Art of Painting

David Berkowitz Chicago

The contemporary painter David Berkowitz Chicago is a widely acknowledged naïve artist, with his own recognizable naive style, painting the memories of his childhood in primary colors. During the last 20 years in which he painted in a naive style, David Berkowitz Chicago exhibited his paintings in several galleries and public buildings in the US, and abroad. His work is in possession of private persons, naive art collectors, and institutions. Here, the artist shares his view on the art of painting.

When art takes a look within itself, then it is possible to call such an approach introverted. A great deal of the 20th-century art production emerged in direct dialogue with art, in interaction with its language and history. It can, therefore, appear to some, that many contemporary works of art primarily comment on the historical development of art, its indirect and immediate precursor. It's as if they are in some lasting controversy and resistance with them, or they admire and worship them. Many artists are looking for new ways within the well-known media. David Berkowitz Chicago mostly does oil and acrylic paintings.

In the desire to liberate the term art of painting from the burden of the past, we don’t rely on any specific artistic style, historical epoch or recent artistic trends. In a way, the name of this collection is desidologized. David Berkowitz Chicago shares in an interview for Patch, that he wants to avoid labeling art as an advanced self-conservative, which implies the terms good or bad art. This enables us to have a more unobtrusive view on modernism, neomodernism, and postmodernism - the most commonly classified works of this category.

The difference between old and new art, realism and modernism, which was expressed clearly by the most prominent advocates of modernism, American critic Clement Greenberg - While realistic art conceals the media by using art to hide art, modern art uses art to draw attention to art itself - can easily be applied to most part of modern and contemporary art today. The dictate of autoreferences, the insistence on the particularities of particular media, and ultimately the articulation of the work of art into the idea of the work, are all results of the same search and looking into their own innermost - the art media itself, which have been defining modern and contemporary art over the decades.