Wallace Berman

Wallace Berman was born in 1926, assembler artist, filmmaker, writer, who loves the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah and publisher of the magazine fit Semira office "poet laureate" for a group without proper form, including Edward Kenholz, George Herms and John Altoon. Berman is often described as the father of the assembly.

The assembly of his group is heavily influenced by Surrealism and to a lesser degree, by the Dada movement. But the art of Berman presents a reaction against the consumer culture product series and the American obsession with novelty, as much as a personal reverie animist, seeing the divine in all things.
It does not merely use the objects found, extracts of the World non artistic Utilities everyday objects: It discovered objects unusually dilapidated, dirty, rejected, worthless - waste - whose lamentable state gives them a power aesthetic evoking the obsolescence, the ruin, history and the strange feeling that their existence seems to transcend time. Yet, and this is the irony, most of its assemblies have survived thanks to the photographic recording, but its two-dimensional collages made the Vérifax (one of the first photocopiers) are what's closest.

They involve images taken by a myriad of sources and arranged in a grid representing transistors, as described by Anne Bartlett Ayres: "The image of radios and serves as a" base "is a collage receiver deities and demons , An issuer of talismans and secret codes: Hebrew letters, crosses of all kinds, locks, keys and doors; fragments of Greek and Eastern sculptures, photographs by contemporary religious leaders appeared in newspapers; naked women, portions of bodies, heaps of 'Stars; rifles and snakes and birds and roses and mushrooms.

In its brief and intense life Berman devoted this relentless pursuit of the unspoken and yet the "unscribed." in 1957, its first and only public exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, was closed by the LAPD and Berman was arrested for displaying what was then regarded as "pornography." As a result of the indignity to which he has undergone it withdraws from the scene of public art completely. Berman abandoned Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, returning in 1963 to Topanga Canyon where he lived and worked until his death. Berman left Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, back in 1963 in Topanga Canyon, where he lived and worked until his death in 1976.

According to Freedom of the Centre Pompidou exhibition Los angeles 1955 - 1985