Artist Statement
I always work on themes, I actually keep several on the stove at once. I like to think that I specialize in versatility, it stimulates my creativity and gives me a sense of accomplishment. This approach is maybe against the main stream of the contemporary art world, but I cannot get stuck doing the same thing over and over. I like to explore new grounds and I constantly work on ideas, producing essays, photographing people and the female body.
I guess my choice of themes fluctuates between dream and reality, between reflection and emotion and also a bit of fascination with transformation. It is the transformation, transition and change in people, bodies, myself and our environment that I am after. Transformation has always driven my work, from my nude and portrait series to the street scenes of Nicaragua and China.
Process Statement
My photographic work derives from the studio where I photograph the model with controlled strobes mixed with projections of photographs previously taken of elements of the earth. Then, in the early days, in my darkroom I printed the photographs conventionally by hand. This work was then scanned into the computer along with color background textures I found, photographed or painted. Today I still use projections and the same approach, but keep my hands clean from the messy darkroom, I use the computer to ad even more layers. The final multi-layered image is printed on museum quality paper using archival inks. I also print on exotic materials like wood or textures that I created. My latest series Displaced is printed with UV cured inks directly to solid and composite metal panels.
John Bernhard is a Swiss American artist and photographer who traveled North America extensively before settling in Houston, Texas in 1980. For more than three decades he has chosen the medium of photography to explore the everyday world from new perspectives, breaking away into different pathways of artistic expression. He continues to devote all of his energy taking photographs and bringing them together to enhance their meaning with visual interplay.
Bernhard was educated at the EPSIC Technical College in Lausanne and at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs de Geneve in Switzerland. He is the author of 9 books among which are: Nudes Metamorphs, Nicaragua, Diptych, Evanescence, Drift, China and his most recent monograph Body Work, a thirty years retrospective of photographs of the Nudes.
Starting in 1985 with a solo exhibition at the Houston Center for Photography, Bernhard has had more than 30 solo shows, three museum exhibitions, and many collective exhibitions throughout the U.S. Canada, and Europe.
In addition, his photographs are included in 20 museum’s permanent collection, such as the Denver Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Musée de la Photographie, Belgium, Musée de L’Elysée, Switzerland, Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark, New Mexico Museum of Arts, Pushkin Museum of Art, Russia, Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work has also been collected by Texas Tech University, International Cultural Center ICASALS, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. In 2001 is work was exhibited in “Body Work” curated by Christian Peterson, a 120 year survey of photographs of the nude selected from the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 2004 his work was exhibited as a retrospective at the Musée des Suisses dans le Monde in Geneva, Switzerland. His children’s portrait series Blue Marble - Environmental Destruction Through the Eyes of Children made its debut with a solo exhibition at Rice University, Houston in 2011 and was featured on Artist A Day online gallery. This series was also awarded third prize in the 2014 Prix de la Photographie Paris.
Bernhard’s work has been reviewed in such publications as Communication Arts, Graphis, Photo District New Magazine, The Houston Chronicle, ArtSpeak Magazine, Swiss Review, and has been widely published in such book as Love & Desire by William A. Ewing, (Chronicle Books), Female Contemporary Nude Photography III, (UDYAT), Spain, and Nude Bible, (Tectum Publishers, Belgium).
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