Derek Weisberg: Fake Flowers

Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present, Fake Flowers, our first solo exhibition with New York based multi-media artists Derek Weisberg. This exhibition brings together two distinct but related bodies of work in the mediums of collage and ceramic. Weisberg’s work is imbued with a sense of play and a generous amount of humor, while paying homage to art historical movements, from Northern European Still Life painting to Arte Povera, from Dadism to early Cubist collage. A limited-edition catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Weisberg’s relationship with the medium of clay was influenced heavily by having grown up in Northern California (where he also attended art school) under the ethos of Robert Arneson, Peter Voulkos, Viola Frey, and Stephen De Staebler. It was not until a move to the East Coast that the notion of clay as a material for making functional objects ever occurred to him, and the collection of vases on display in this exhibition, from the series Tell me About the Worms, is emblematic of that dichotomy. In these works, the recognizable vase form has been mutated and morphed, with human faces enmeshed in the surfaces, seemingly in protest of any possible classification as merely “everyday objects.”

The mixed media collages, from the series Fake Flowers, question ideas of beauty and permanence, utilizing fake flowers as motif. In our attempt to immortalize life by manufacturing artificial flowers, do we ultimately minimize nature’s glory, reducing it into gaudy trinkets?

There is a crude tenderness to Weisberg’s work, as if his objects have been so well cared for that they’ve broken, then been lovingly reassembled. Their fissures and sutures are proud battle wounds of the process – metaphorical reflections on the artist’s view of the act of living.

Derek Weisberg (b. 1983, Santa Rosa, California) graduated with a BFA and high honors from California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA in 2005. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, nationally and internationally.  Weisberg has also participated in numerous residencies including: The Residency Program, Versailles, France (2019), Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY (2018), and Fountainhead residency, Miami, FL, (2012). He is the subject of a recent monograph, Masques et Bergamasques, published by Editions Lord Byron, Paris, France. Weisberg currently lives and works in NY and is faculty at Greenwich House Pottery.