Special Installation in Memoriam of Jerry Carniglia
February 5 - March 24, 2016
Jerry Carniglia, One Bird Knows The Hour Of My Death, oil on canvas, oil on canvas, 67 x 59 inches
Chandra Cerrito Contemporary is pleased to announce a special installation in honor of the Bay Area-based artist Jerry Carniglia, who passed away last summer. The installation will include a selection of Carniglia’s large-scale oil paintings, and will be on view beginning February 5 through March 24, 2016.
On view in the CCC Back Room gallery, this special installation will be presented concurrently with an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley Campus, also opening in February. A full-color catalog in conjunction with the Townsend Center exhibition is available.
Born in San Francisco in 1946, Carniglia was a naval sailor, a founding member of two Bay Area theater companies, and a furniture-maker before becoming an artist. He passed away in June 2015 in Emeryville, where he was an active part of the artist community for 35 years. Throughout his career, he employed a variety of painting techniques including gestural brushwork, hand applications, spray applications, and image projections, as well as a unique experimentation of draining pigment-solvent mixtures over areas of the canvas. He worked in the vein of Abstract Expressionists, layering a rich palette and loose brushwork. His work could also be described as contemporary Baroque, with its exaggerated sense of motion, grandeur and implied drama. Carniglia’s process-driven methods and exploratory nature parallel the artist’s constant and evolving search for meaning that may be found in the unseen and otherwise unarticulated structures that underlie all of existence.
Carniglia received his BA in English and Dramatic Arts, as well as his MFA in Painting at UC Berkeley. He was a recipient of numerous grants and prizes including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship; Zellerbach Family Fund Projects Awards; a National Endowment for the Arts grant; The Eisner Prize, UCB; and the James Phelan Award. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, deYoung Museum, and Berkeley Art Museum. Chandra Cerrito Contemporary has exhibited Carniglia’s work since 2007, including a solo exhibition in 2013.
