David Bierk died in August 2002 at the age of 58 after fighting a valiant battle with cancer. Most of the paintings in our 2003 exhibitions, spanning the last decade, have never been seen before. Each of the four exhibitions is named with a word the artist used in his paintings; the first show is entitled "Sanctuary," the second "Memory," the third "History," and the fourth "Life."

Long before the word "appropriation" arose as a term in contemporary art, David Bierk began a lifelong homage to the masters and a deep exploration of the history of art. As early as graduate school for a thesis project, he used the background of the "Mona Lisa" in his self-portrait.

The artist's love of history and his enthusiasm to re-present the masters in a new context was a constant and consistent motif throughout his oeuvre. Bierk's still life paintings are after some of the artist's favorite masters: Fantin laTour, Manet, the Dutch masters.

In each case, Bierk alters the image, changes its scale, magnifies the proportions and paints with the gusto and passion that were his signature. Many of the still life works are surrounded by steel, an industrial material. Bierk intentionally set up a tension between the softness of oil and the hardness of steel, between the painting as a valued object, and steel — a construction material of no inherent value. It was the dialogue of these divergent chords the artist addressed conceptually in his still life paintings.

Bierk's landscapes honor the Hudson River painters; creators of idealized landscapes. His landscapes are, for the most part, invented, beginning as abstract symphonies of many layers of paint, building toward voluptuous surfaces of crusty oil, sometimes on concrete, at other times on steel or canvas. A few of the landscapes pay tribute to the grandeur of Bierstadt in choice of location and image. Of primary import in the landscapes is the glowing sky; a fiery golden aura connects one Bierk landscape to another. Meandering rivers or ponds amdist clusters of trees are Bierk's vision in landscape. Among the most passionate landscapes are three of Bierk's final works on concrete, each with a word in gold floating in the foreground: MEMORY, LIFE, FAITH.

While most of Bierk's history paintings will be on view in his third show, a few are included in this exhibition, some juxtaposing a landscape with a still life after a master, Matisse, van der Ast, Manet. Others juxtapose two master images in different scale, and finally in a Eulogy To Gauguin and Earth, Bierk paints a detail of a Gauguin woman and partners her with a brute plate of steel through which he drills screws, an impenetrable mirror to the beauty accompanying it on the right.

reating two sides of equal intensity clearly shows the artist's post modern attitude and invites the viewer into a dialogue. Of his juxtapositions, the artist said: "I arrange and re-arrange these elements to create a series of visual and intellectual collisions, bringing into relief the complex interchanges and precarious co-existence of their parts."

David Bierk's paintings after the masters are done in the spirit of praise, celebration and homage to the act of painting. The artist said of these diptychs; "my quest to resolve the polarities of past and present, of life and death, of preservation and destruction, delivers a series of images and ideas that converge and resist, that vacillate between the reciprocal and the parasitic, that speak to my personal and universal concerns, to explore the boundaries and relationships between art, culture and humanity."