Emily Berger lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of  Brown University, she received an MFA in painting from Columbia University, attended the Skowhegan School in Maine and has been awarded several residency fellowships, including from Millay Arts. She is a recipient of the John Hultberg Memorial Prize in Painting from The National Academy Museum. Her work has been exhibited widely and reviewed in numerous publications such as The Hudson Review, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic, and The Boston Globe. She is included in many private and public collections.  

Solo exhibitions have been presented at Starr Suites, TenBerke Architects, Walter Wickiser Gallery, Norte Maar, Scholes Street Studio, and The Painting Center, all in New York City. Recent exhibitions also include Conversations, at Helm Contemporary; PLAYLIST, at One GAP Gallery; The Line Up at Cedar Crest College and Murray State; SONIC at Metaphor Gallery; Form and Intent at Abstract Project in Paris; 11 Women of Spirit at Zurcher Gallery; and Side to Side, Three Ways at Key Projects, reviewed by Karen Wilkin in the Hudson Review. Berger is a member of American Abstract Artists and has been included in many AAA exhibitions such as Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists,1936-Present, On Balance, and The Onward of Art.

Artist Statement

I approach my paintings like writing or music, making deliberate and improvisatory marks with rests and breaks along the way. The vertical format is like a page for notation and also mirrors the body. I would like the viewer to experience the painting as if in conversation, listening and responding.

As I paint, my hand stops and stutters, making a variety of marks, pulses and intervals in a mix of rhythms, texture, and color, creating various kinds of space and light. The wood panels I paint on provide a warm, tactile and patterned ground on which to begin. I choose scale, color, squeegees, brushes and other tools, painting with oil in a primarily horizontal, sometimes vertical motion - layering, revising and reconsidering as I go; a malleable grid provides a loose structure for me. I select the colors and structure of the work, but with each  pass, the unpredictable emerges. My intuitive response to these changes guides the painting’s evolution; chance and control are both at play. Variation and surprise, freedom within the structure of repetitive movement and mark making are the key elements of my work; they work as a way to combine and resolve the analytical and the emotional, the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and irrational. Within the limitations of the rectangle there is infinite room.