Monica Bernier - City Views

The Bowery Gallery presents the recent work of Monica Bernier in a series of paintings of New York City that are all deeply engaged with architectural space and color. Largely they look at the artist’s native home and are all keenly aware of the structures that surround us in that environment.  Often the compositions are conceived of from vantage points on elevated structures like the Metro North platform in Harlem or from Bernier’s eighth floor studio window.

The painting “East Harlem Buildings” is an excellent example of Bernier’s strategy for communicating her profound immersion in the urban environment. Entering from the right hand side of the painting, in three dramatic planes (walls), the eye is carried to the center of the composition, a large windowless ocher wall. Beyond that wall’s left edge, deep space is defined by buildings across the street that in turn plunge back out of view where there will be no release to the horizon, only more buildings. The artist has just taken us on a thrilling journey of the eye.

In “850 Amsterdam Avenue” a familiar green construction fence defines the foreground just beyond which a new building will soon rise. On the far margin of that midground open lot, buildings on the right and left direct the viewer to a complicated view of a cluster of buildings rising luminous in late afternoon sun. In this painting the city is perceived from an embedded vantage point.

“I was born and grew up in Manhattan so my natural environment is the stone and brick ‘cliff dwellings’ of the upper west side. In this body of work my intent is to find beautiful geometric compositions and heightened color in the buildings with only the sky, the light and occasional hints of trees or shrubs to reference nature. In these unpeopled city scenes, the manmade structures and my decisions as a painter are the human presence.”