Marina Berio : Family Matter     16/06 - 28/07/2018 

Marina Berio considers the physicality of the photographic image and the themes of her work, often drawn from her private life, are integrated into the very process of producing the image.  With the series Family Matter she photographed her husband and their young son over five years as they played, wrestled, got angry and made up again, a tender rite of passage between father and growing son captured by the artist, and mother, and printed with the delicate gum bichromate process using the artist's own blood for pigment.  The exhibition will also include several charcoal drawings by the artist.  Marina Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York and in 2017 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

This is the series Family Matter : over five years the artist photographed her husband and young son alternately play, tease, wrestle and rest. In this series of ‘family snapshots’, the ballet of limbs captures the growing and changing relationship between father and son, in a recurring cycle of playfulness, irritation, anger and love, that is observed by the mother-photographer who is also the third point of this family triangle. In mingling her own blood with the photographic printing process Marina Berio signals the unique and authentic nature of the ‘blood ties’ that bind her not only the two wrestling males but to the ‘blood prints’ themselves, which by definition cannot be reproduced without her. The prints are of a small format (25,5 x 25,5 cm) that emphasises their personal, intimate nature. The exhibition will include several drawings by the artist, in dialogue with the photographic series Family Matter.

Marina Berio (b. 1966, USA) is a visual artist from New York City. She studied photography, drawing, sculpture and art history in college, obtaining her MFA in Photography at Bard College. Marina Berio has been awarded grants by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and been invited to various residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay and Schloss Plüschow. She has exhibited at various art spaces internationally, including Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, Von Lintel Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, and Artists Space in New York; Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art in Boston; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris; and Otto Zoo and Acta International in Italy. Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York.

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