North America

Wallace Berman

Untitled

1960

Untitled, 1960

This untitled collage by Wallace Berman exemplifies his innovative approach to collage and assemblage within the context of the Beat Generation. This artwork, created through the technique of Verifax collage, features a grid of repeated photographic images, each subtly altered to create a rhythm and narrative unique to Berman’s vision. The imagery, often drawn from popular culture, religious iconography, and esoteric symbols, reflects Berman’s deep interest in mysticism and the intersection of the sacred and the profane. The repetitive nature of the grid structure suggests a meditation on the ubiquity of media and its impact on consciousness. Berman’s work is characterized by its introspective and cryptic quality, inviting viewers to decipher the layers of meaning embedded in the visual juxtaposition. The work stands as a testament to Berman’s role as a pivotal figure in the West Coast art scene, blending personal symbolism with a broader cultural critique.

Wallace Berman is considered to be the father of the Californian assemblage movement (a title he could probably dispute with Edward Kienholz). Characteristically unruly, Berman was an active member of the San Francisco and Los Angeles Beat communities in the mid-1950s. In 1963 he settled in Topanga Canyon and started to develop the body of work for which he would become most famous. The Verifax machine, a precursor to the photocopy machine, lent the name to the series of collages with which Berman experimented until his death in 1976. The structural compositional element that unifies Bermna’s body of work is the image, appropriated from a magazine, of a hand holding a transistor radio. By photocopying and reproducing this image in sequential form on top of the canvas, Berman mimics the pattern produced by an old film reel. Inside the frame of each radio, the artist superimposed imagery—people, objects and symbols, often taken from pop culture—pertinent to that particular sequence of the work.

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Wallace Berman Untitled

Wallace Berman

Untitled