Barry Whistler is pleased present Berliner Geschichten (Berlin Stories), a group show featuring Terrell James, Bo Joseph and Adam Raymont. The show will include works inspired by or created during the time these three artists shared together in Berlin last fall.

Houston based artist Terrell James will include new paintings and studies from her time in Berlin. She has been drawn to the city since her first visit there three years ago. After subsequent trips to see the great collections and history of the city itself, she decided to spend extended work time there. Her paintings express her involvement in exploring the emotional and psychological tone of the place, its history and current thriving community for contemporary art. “These days I think of the tone of the city, the rich extremes traced block by block, as growing out of the place's endemic paradoxical marginality. By this I mean the experience one has here of being simultaneously both at the center of (recent) history, and at its edge.”

Bo Joseph is a New York artist and this is his first show with the Barry Whistler Gallery. Bo looks for culturally significant icons and ethnographic art in books and auction catalogues. He abstracts these images by layering and outlining them to create something free from its original meaning and purpose. Bo says of his process, “I incorporate deconstructive, chancy techniques like sanding, masking and rinsing to invoke the anomalous and transient nature of material meaning and to instigate new roles for these archetypal sources.” In the historical layering of destruction and reinvention in Berlin, Bo found new sources of charged imagery, encouraged by an art scene he found to be refreshingly focused on substance over status. He found that Berliners “don’t want to hear a resume listing all of the parties in the establishment that have granted their approval. Instead, they want to know what your ideas are and if you can substantiate them in an authentic way.”

Adam Raymont lives and works in Berlin. He will present new works on paper mounted on wood, incorporating drawing and painting, also accompanied by new monochromatic silk-screened images. In the drawing process, Adam carefully renders graphics in several stages before ‘locating’ the forms in a layered space populated by raw marks, drips and a sense of first (or fading) light. The shapes shift between pattern and form representing a kind of framework of space and memory, open to the elements but solid, indelible structures, none-the-less. The inclusion of images originating from photographs taken in Berlin, Adam states, “is a way of mediating my observations of, and connection to, a city with a multi-layered history and in constant, if not stunted, regeneration."