BERGSTEIN / French, born in 1988
WORKS
PATH
Born in 1988, Bergstein grew up between Paris and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. At the age of 18, he leaves France for Spain. First Ibiza, then Barcelona where he joined an industrial design school. Back in Paris, he completes his studies at ESMOD and obtains a degree in fashion design.
Accustomed by his training to instant sketching for material purposes, Bergstein decided to free himself from this discipline and become a designer in his own right. He then turned the sketch, which was the first concrete artistic testimony to his imagination as a stylist, into a field of evolution and experimentation, accumulating silhouettes and recreating universes borrowed from theater, fashion and dance. The drawing is no longer a support or a step in a process, it becomes the center of a purely aesthetic research.
Bergstein produces most of his work on pattern canvas, a fabric dear to fashion designers, which he used to make his prototypes. The fabric is woven, textured and raw, allowing him to bring authentic and innovative effects to his drawing technique. Under the juxtaposed strokes of his Pilot pen, like countless small hatchings, the bodies become motifs that he repeats or fragments, dialoguing with the void to which he leaves an important place, in a delicate search for balance and harmony.
EXHIBITIONS
2023 - Le 3537, Paris
2022 - Miami Art Week
2019 - Galerie Boa, Paris
2017 - Galerie Boa, Paris
2016 - Gwangju Art Fair, Corea
2013 - Galerie Lacroix, Paris
"AN ANT THAT DRAWS" - by Anne-Laure Peressin
Bergstein draws from the ancient sources of the representation of the body, from the elementary codes erected in antiquity defining grace and harmony. His great mastery of proportions and dimensions, his sharp knowledge of anatomy in volume, gave him a specific know-how in the conception of sketches, cutting plans, prototypes and patterns. From these skills, Bergstein has developed a strong taste for line art. With a Pilot Pen, his favorite tool, he quickly took pleasure in capturing a silhouette in a few lines on paper.
One day, when he runs out of paper, he grabs whatever he has on hand to continue his sketches. It was then that he took hold of the pattern canvas, a cheap undyed cotton textile. The rendering of the black ink on this woven material generates a revelation: the need to appropriate it and explore its potential.
As a tribute or a mise en abyme, Bergstein creates on this patterned canvas forms that we might think are pre-cut. But this is not the case. Each figure is drawn, and even repeated, freehand. This process of creation upsets the very essence of the support: from a modest material of transfer, this fabric becomes a noble medium of art, just like a painter's canvas. And to magnify it even more, once the form is determined and delineated, Bergstein undertakes a slow and tedious filling in where the materiality of the canvas is sublimated, by letting the tip of his pen be led along the weft threads, or conversely, by drawing small lines that collide with the furrows. Stroke after stroke, line after line, like an ant builder, Bergstein progressively covers the surface with black, blue or red ink, more or less diluted depending on whether he decides to go over it or not, to create relief and volumes, to reveal the curve of a breast or the roundness of a buttock. To make extraordinary a so ordinary textile.
