A few months ago, American painter David Berkowitz Chicago displayed a selection of some of his most recent works, representing an oeuvre of sixteen works created in the last few years of his work. Performed in oil on canvas and cardboard techniques, the exhibition is dominated by portraits of contemporaries, stylishly defined by the author’s peculiar realism. With the demanding level of technical performance, David Berkowitz Chicago undoubtedly prioritizes the visual over the contextual, but does not take away, does not deny the model a layered representation or psychological personalization, a motive for attaching personality.
His paintings show the minute modeling of the form and the choice of objects of daily use that attribute high aesthetic value to the artistic interpretation. Line manuscript and graphic surface treatment builds the tangibility of the textures of the materials presented or the reflective smoothness of the object surface, while emphasizing the dynamics of details such as the folding of the drapery or the depth of space by the compositional parameters. Within the selection of works, there are also motifs of the landscape and the cityscape of Chicago. The immaculate, meticulous David Berkowitz Chicago figuration is as pronounced in large formats as it is in painting miniature.
Although the naïve art painter finds some inspiration or formal solutions in references to art and film history such as Brueghel and Andrei Tarkovsky, his ideas stem from subtle stimuli of his own life. Hence, after much deliberation, they build and become shaped into visual aesthetics of a high aesthetic level, relying on the values of traditional painting, and again dealing with the universal problem of painting itself and, as the author says, finding himself in it.
David Berkowitz Chicago was born in 1943, in Aurora, where he finished elementary school. After that he moved to Chicago, where he enrolled the Art Institute of Chicago. David Berkowitz Chicago is a member of the multimedia association The Village. His peculiar style with characteristic elements immediately distinguished him from the other painters in the group. He lives and creates in Chicago. The artist is currently working on a new painting collection. It will be a collection of naïve art paintings, with specific elements, which will remind the observer about his childhood.
David Berkowitz Chicago 