[open the box] Michael Biberstein

The two paintings and the drawing by Michael Biberstein that belong to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos are a single work, conceived for an installation that he made in 1991 at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in a dialogue with a painting belonging to the museum’s collection, a shipwreck by the French painter Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789).

Vernet’s painting is the scene of a shipwreck, and has all the ingredients of the codes of painting of the Ancien Régime: the survivors of the shipwreck are on a raft, facing the fury of the seas, but there is a glimmer of hope in the beach cliff where there is a shelter, an old ruin. The centre of the painting is taken up by a grey mass, a threatening rock represented in an almost abstract form, against which the ship must have met its fate.

Starting from this historical configuration of the depiction of the shipwreck – with its signs of danger and salvation, which are so close to the course of History – Biberstein carried out his project. The scale of his paintings is impressive; they are liquid spaces in which the spectator’s gaze is lost, into which we can physically dive. The horizontal painting, which is monumental in its scale, is an enormous canvas that does not in fact correspond to the depiction of a landscape. More than this, the painting behaves like a landscape when we look at it: we may move along the painting, physically, walking and finding our distance. The vertical painting is a monolith, equivalent to the dark mass that occupies the centre of Vernet’s painting.

What is most interesting in Michael Biberstein’s painting is that, unlike what happens in most historical painting, we are given no indication of where to look. There is no indication of the place on which we should focus our attention in the fluid spaces that stand out to the spectator, in the dark masses or in the subtle, luminous transparencies.

A drawing is placed on a table in the middle of the room. It is a map of an event, and establishes a relationship that it is for our wandering steps around the room to decipher. That is it, imagination. Forming images. And these paintings are the screens on which they are projected.

Biography
Michael Biberstein was born in 1948 in Solothurn (Switzerland), and has dual nationality (Swiss and American). He lives and works in Portugal and Switzerland. He studied History of Art with David Sylvester, at the Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia, USA (1963-1968). He has held solo exhibitions since 1974. He participated at the Sydney Biennial in 1988 and the 9th Documenta in 1992, with note also for the solo exhibition A difícil travessia dos Alpes, presented at the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 1995). His work is represented in several private and institutional collections, among which are the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Lisbon), the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid).

Bibliography
Acerca de Vernet, da paisagem, do sublime e do belo, e qual a relevância que podem ainda ter na arte contemporânea (cat.), Lisboa, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, 1991.
Michael Biberstein: a difícil travessia dos Alpes (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1995.