Current Exhibition: Press "Four Galleries, Four Artists"
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, p. 1 of 3

Michael Berger Gallery has touched all the bases in its current show, "Four Galleries Four Artists." Paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures/models respectively represent the work of artists whose points of view are as diverse as their collective media. Unexpectedly, but surely not accidentally, they and the show are linked together by an underlying mood of introspection/retrospection.

Fresh from a recent solo show at the same gallery, Hung Liu continues her reflections on Chinese history and culture in her substantial figural lithographs and aquatints. Some of these are straightforward printings in black ink; others build on that basic impresspion and enrich it with color. The images are derived from historical photographs that depict social archetypes of an earlier China.

The strength of these works derives from the artist's instinct for the human qualities of the images she has chosen and from the shifting demands of acknowledgement and association that the layering of materials and images impose on the viewer.

A kind of layering is also evident in the paintings in oil on aluminum (listen up, Alcoa!) by Oklahoma artist David Crismon. Taking as his point of departure a recognized European or American Old Master painting, Crismon revises and reworks the composition. Sometimes the procedure is a sort of cut-and-paste; in others there is a variation of scale or focus. Always, color is remanaged, and the paint surface, which on a metal support can be of mirror smoothness, is both emphasized and denied as an image carrier by incised striations.