A Personal Odyssey

On Friday, January 27, from 6 to 9 p.m., the Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts will open three new exhibitions: Something, an ambitious site-specific installation by Cincinnati sculptor Sonja Henrixson, that contrasts the randomness of the natural world with the order of the built environment; "In the Spaces We Talk," a new series of large-scale ethereal paintings and intimate works on paper by Cincinnati painter Yvonne van Eijden; and A Personal Odyssey, an eclectic mix of paintings, jewelry and elaborate mixed-media installation by Chicago artist Martin Bernstein. 

A mixed-media artist living in Chicago, Martin Bernstein works in painting, jewelry and environmental installations that merge together in an ongoing narrative. Born in Cincinnati, Bernstein left the city in 1980 to move to Los Angeles, where he initiated yearly road trips traversing the United States while marketing his work from New York to Los Angeles and Houston to Chicago. Bernstein’s paintings, with their distressed and heavily worked surfaces, suggest archaeological works excavated from earthen tombs; while his delicately assembled jewelry and richly ornamented objects suggest a previous life—a lost treasure raised from the depths of the ocean floor. Combining these elements, Bernstein will construct an installation reflecting a personal history forged by years of travel and discovery. A Personal Odyssey represents Bernstein’s first solo exhibition in Cincinnati since 1982.

Martin Bernstein studied at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 1968 and later earned a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1971. He was one of the original founding members of C.A.G.E., a former alternative exhibition venue in Cincinnati formed in 1978. In a career spanning more than thirty years, his work has been exhibited extensively in Cincinnati, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Newport Beach and New York City. Bernstein’s jewelry has been featured at Saks Fifth Avenue in Chicago, Manhattan, San Francisco and Bal Harbour, Fla. His paintings and works on paper are represented in numerous private and corporate collections.

An informal Gallery Talk with the artist will be presented in the Weston Art Gallery on Tuesday, February 7 at 7 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.