Margot Bergman: On the other hand at Anton Kern Gallery

Anton Kern Gallery presents On the other hand, Margot Bergman's fifth solo exhibition in New York. It brings together paintings made between 2012 and 2014 that have never been shown in the city, alongside a selection of large-scale portraits from 2015 to 2019, so that the later work can be read against the period that led to it.

From the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, Bergman started from paintings by unknown hands that she bought in Chicago thrift shops. She painted directly into their landscapes and still lifes to bring out faces: a clearing in the woods became the contour of a head, while barns, vases and flower arrangements were adjusted into eyes and red lips. Working this way sharpened her eye, and she began to want more freedom. In 2012 she set the thrift-store collection aside and turned to blank canvases of whatever size she chose.

Without existing marks to respond to, her handling grew looser and more expressionistic. Alone in a studio in the woods, she worked the way her favorite jazz musicians play, with meandering lines like slurred notes and runs of repeated pattern. Flowers, horizon lines, lattices, sunshine yellow, grass green and moonlight blue enter the pictures, and shapes slide between plants, animals and figures. In Parade, two flowers stand in contrapposto as if talking; in Candy Man, a cartoon hand offers a lollipop to a smiling plant; in Lucky Lady, a diamond pattern turns into dice. Hunger, from 2014, places a ring of onlookers around a floating pair of lips, and Gloria, a face built from faces, leads into the large portraits of imagined women that dominated her output from 2015 to 2019.

Those portraits are big, loose and emotionally raw. Photorealistic eyes and mouths sit beside scribbled green hair and a thin wash of skin color, producing distorted beauties that recall Dadaist collage. Bare primed canvas shows beneath graffiti-like marks, and there are no thick layers to hide splatters or corrections; irregularities are kept and sometimes emphasized. The women appear suspended between forming and unraveling. The most recent work on view, Pupa (2019), has features that dissolve into the faint suggestion of a floral bouquet. Each painting is left with a loose thread, as the gallery puts it, so the artist can keep going.

The checklist also includes portraits titled Rebel, Gertrude, Sherry, Heather, Liz, Hillary, Patty and Bobbi, along with early works such as Tempest, Clatter, Mars Black, Liquid Vanilla and Fragments. The show runs through October 31, 2026, at 16 East 55th Street, open Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm.