Zeke Berman

(American, b. 1951)

Untitled (Fruit Basket), 1984

Zeke Berman’s background as a sculptor is evident in his painstakingly fabricated arrangements for the camera. Using string, wood, clay, water, paper, and glass, Berman creates complicated still lifes that resist clear-cut visual interpretation. By conflating the difference between what is seen by the eye and what is seen by the camera, Berman incites our imagination and challenges our perception.

Born in New York in 1951, Zeke Berman is a graduate New York’s High School of Music and Art and the Philadelphia College of Art (BFA in sculpture, 1972). Included in many major museum collections, Berman’s photographs have been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art; Friends of Photography, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Berman is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the McDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Berman, Zeke. Zeke Berman: Photographs [exhibition] March 11-April 8, 1989. New York : Lieberman & Saul Gallery, 1989.

Berman, Zeke.; Subler, Craig Allen. Zeke Berman, Photographs: [exhibition] March 27-May 15, 1992. Kansas City, Mo.: UMKC Gallery of Art, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1992.

Berman, Zeke.; Trachtenberg, Marvin. Zeke Berman, Photographs: Lieberman & Saul Gallery, March 11-April 8, 1989. New York: The Gallery, 1989.

Berman, Zeke.; Westerbeck, Colin. Zeke Berman: Photographs. [Portland, Me.: Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art], 1997.