A key figure in Boston painting for over twenty years, Gerry Bergstein opens in October, 2006 his first exhibition at Gallery NAGA, in which the careening energy of his large canvases is accompanied by new directions in his work - photographs, some of which are painted into, and a four-foot heaving mound of collaged images from which the exhibition takes its title.

Gerry Bergstein: This Is Your Brain On Art runs from October 13 through November 4. A reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, October 13 from 6 to 8pm.  In addition, Bergstein offers a free public talk on his work, This Is My Brain On Art, on Saturday, October 21 at 2pm.

Bergstein’s work has often been characterized by manic activity – a profusion of images, sometimes autobiographical; narrative incidents involving cultural icons “from Freud to Homer Simpson,” in Bergstein’s phrase; agitated paint handling.  In the new work, this energy is fully displayed in some places, but is situated under the surface in others.

In the boulder-like mass of images This Is Your Brain On Art, Bergstein accumulates dozens and dozens of iconic art historical and personal images.  It’s a taped-together anthology, and it, and the photographic works based on it, bristle with ricocheting references.

The paintings, however, are depictions of energy masked, and what we see are forms barely containing forces.  Priapic, volcanic protrusions jut upward from the earth; vast orbs spin wildly; façade-like masses expand and crack open.  But these skins, barely holding together, are also diaphanous, as if a breeze or a glance would disperse them.

So all of this momentous power is also an illusion.  Underneath it all, there’s not much there.  And that seems to be the perspective of the tiny figure in the foreground, the little self-portrait, the Bergstein dwarfed by all of this, who is calmly making a drawing of it all.

Like Bergstein’s great Entropy Series begun in the 1990’s, there is vastness beneath the furor.  In those, fruits and vegetation rotted away and the paper beneath them rotted too, showing them to be depictions and revealing a twinkling void underneath everything.  That same limitless galactic space is visible through the cracks of these towers of babel.

Gerry Bergstein’s work has been collected by major museums in this region and by private collectors internationally and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.  A longtime faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bergstein is in the third generation of the lineage of Boston Expressionism, his mentor at the Museum School having been the eccentric and startling painter Henry Schwartz, a student of Karl Zerbe, who, along with Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom, defined post-war contemporary art in Boston.