April 5-27, 2024
Opening Reception: April 4, 6-8pm
THE GREAT BELOW

When a deep rumble emerges from your inner core. When you get the unsettling feeling of something watching you,

hiding in the shadows. Take a moment and listen closely. It might just be us. We are the creatures in the corner of your eyes. We are that feeling of a sweet missing, that profound yearning for a time and a place that never was. We are here. Always have been, always will be. There is no need to be afraid. We have been waiting for you. Now that you found us, we will never leave you. Just take our hand and dive. You’re home now.

Welcome to the Great Below.

a World beyond Reality

Chris Berens creates visions of his internal universe as if he sees it through an ancient handmade lens which warps and obscures his view of that curious place in unpredictable ways.
His kaleidoscopic mirror world, inhabited by an exotic menagerie of beasts, mysterious Madonnas and lost children, is richly represented with color palettes, environments and themes reminiscent of the Dutch Golden Age masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt, yet its overall effect is vaguely disturbing, in the manner of Rosamond Wolff Purcell and the Brothers Quay.

-Amanda Erlanson

Explore all shows

Delicate

The Hug Squad – New Dawn

Amsterdam

Go West

Archive

Creating the album cover for Blondie’s Panic of Girls and Debbie Harry’s 2011 world tour stage persona.

Store

Purchase a print

Visit the website of Leeuwenhart Publishing House and let us share the magic with you. 

Chris Berens works feel like intimate, slightly discomforting pinhole views. Imperfectly focused, seemingly distorted by primitive lenses and damaged by the passing decades. Like the daguerreotype photographs of the 1850’s, these miniature paintings bring us a rare and fragmentary view of a time and place that we can never visit. They will not divulge the true nature of what is portrayed, but will forever bear witness to its existence.

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