Kevin Bernstein

Associate Professor & Area Coordinator, Painting

Email: kevinber@ksu.edu
Website: http://www.kevinbernstein.com
Office: 119 Willlard Hall

M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing, University of Washington, 2005
B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design, 1999

Bio

Kevin Bernstein (MFA, University of Washington, 2005; BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, 1999; European Honors Program, Rome, 1997) explores the interconnectedness of humankind, nature, and science through painting and works on paper. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Armenia. Exhibition venues include The Painting Center (New York City), CICA Museum (Seoul, Korea), Strohl Art Center (Chautauqua, NY), Katonah Museum of Art (NY), TARFEST (Los Angeles), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Yerevan Modern Museum of Art (Armenia).

Bernstein’s work has been selected for exhibitions juried by leading curators and critics such as Howard N. Fox (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Samantha Rippner (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC), Douglas Fogle (Hammer Museum, UCLA), Alma Ruiz (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), John Yau (art critic and curator), and Shana Nys Dambrot (Arts Editor, LA Weekly). His artist residencies include the National Parks Artist-in-Residence Program, Centrum Foundation, Governor’s Island (NYC), and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts.

Professor Bernstein leads the Painting area and serves as Graduate Faculty in the Department of Art at Kansas State University, where he is also the Executive Director of Nature Collab. He is represented in the Artist Registry at The Painting Center in New York City and is a member of the Los Angeles Artist Association.

Artist Statement

Slowing down to discover how the familiar is unfamiliar in nature has enhanced my vision as a painter. The ephemeral and elemental experiences in nature are a spiritual guide to help explore painting as a journey of discovery as well as invention. The elements of nature, in flux and change, decay and growth, become a metaphor for the process of painting. I am drawn to these elements as they transcend time and place.

Through the lens of the natural—the bombardment of technological advances and scientific imagery in daily life has affected my understanding of self and place in the natural world. What we know and question through science changes my relationship to the natural world and expands my visual lexicon and perceptions of geologic time, the biological, and the organic. Understanding the natural process—the phenomenon, the science—conjures the imagination. I am attempting to create something that invokes an experience that is as powerful and felt to me as that which I may happen upon in nature.

In my work, I respond to the process of painting as it cues the sensation of the natural. Often unnatural or manmade processes or materials synthesize the natural. As my work becomes more process-oriented through the puddling, pooling, staining, repelling, and spreading of paint or its layering, building, or accumulation—a morphology of the natural world occurs, blurring the line between the natural and unnatural.

Looking toward the macro and micro worlds one sees organizing principles, processes, and patterns that mirror or question the human/nature relationship. I am interested in how nature’s role in society has changed throughout history. Through my work I hope to better understand nature as a primal source in a complex and ever-changing world in need of preservation and restraint.