Atticus Bergman’s Crayola crayon drawings have been featured on the covers of books and scholarly periodicals, as well as in magazines such as Artforum, Cultured, and n+1.
In New York, his drawings have been shown at galleries like Kai Matsumiya and James Fuentes, where he had his first solo exhibition in 2017. In 2022, Gilles Heno-Coe curated a special exhibition of his work that explored the tension between the abstract concept of personal charisma and the concrete structure of physical anatomy. Writing for Artforum in 2019, Ottessa Moshfegh listed Atticus Bergman’s Crayola crayon drawings as one of her favorite objects from cultural history, alongside the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and the recorded songs of Billie Holiday. Before he began making visual art, Atticus studied the intersection between psychoanalytic, philosophical, and aesthetic forms of knowledge at Stanford University.
Exhibiting Artworks
In his Crayola crayon drawings, Atticus Bergman constructs systems of evocative ambiguity. These compositions often explore the crisis of meaning that exists at the edge of human culture, where the language of human self-understanding denatures and aesthetic indeterminacy is encouraged to bloom. In other words, his images thrive in the space where familiar distinctions begin to collapse: e.g. the absurd and the profound, the mortal and the divine, the human and the animal. As such, they remain especially attentive to the inscrutable countenance of creatures and babies, as well as to the historical legacy of artworks that have emerged from moments of violent theological debate, such as Byzantine icons, Lutheran altarpieces, and Fayum mummy portraits.
