JULY 2010

Many of the staff here at Denbigh are also practicing artists and we are very pleased to showcase their talents and careers in a continuing series of articles on this blog. In January 2010, our monthly entry featured a profile of long time Denbigh crate builder Paul Ewert. Next up in this series is Holger Kalberg.

In addition to his career as a painter and art educator, Holger Kalberg has worked at Denbigh since July 2009. A man of many talents, Holger is one of our primary art installers and brings his fine carpentry skills to our crate building department when we need him. Starting in September 2010, Holger will also be working as a sessional instructor at Simon Fraser University and teaching a third year studio class in painting.

Holger is represented by the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver, Clark and Faria in Toronto, and was the subject of a solo exhibition of recent work entitled Holger Kalberg: Painting/ Collage (June 23 to August 8, 2010) at Clark and Faria. On the left are three images from this show.

Toronto-based art writer Vanessa Nicholas reviewed his show for Canadian Art online:

"Holger Kalberg’s exhibition of new works at Clark & Faria, fittingly titled Painting/Collage, was an inspired conversation between two mediums that have had an uncomfortable co-existence. Looking at the works in this show, I couldn't help but be reminded of how painting and collage began as allies. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque jointly invented the collage medium in 1912 amidst efforts to advance the development of cubism. Collage helped Picasso and Braque reform their painted experience of three-dimensional vision by enabling them to literally fuse reality and art, with their experiments featuring newsprint, oilcloth, wood-grain paper and product labels. Later, painting and collage began taking disparate paths when dada artists introduced photomontage—with the gap between the mediums widening as photomontage reigned supreme in the pop and pictures-generation eras.

"In this exhibition, Kalberg boldly rejected collage’s overwhelmingly photo-based history and paid homage to the medium’s roots. His Structure is an electric composition of vivid colours, bold lines and graphic shapes. The central “structure” is built using strips of paper painted black, pink, orange, green and blue. Rounds of colour punctuate the imagined space like flare in a photograph. The pasted elements float against a painted, dreamy blue background. The importance given to the picture’s depth gestures to the dilemma that inspired Picasso and Braque to adopt collage as an art-making tool in the first place: pictorial flatness."

Full length version of this article

Holger’s work Atrium with Diving Tower (left) was also included in a group show, Salon (July 14 to August 14, 2010), at the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver.

Holger will also be part of a duo show with Kristine Moran in September 2010 at
the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver.

Everyone at Denbigh Fine Art Services would like to wish Holger all the best with his career. PROST!