Adrian Berg was born in London in 1929. Initially a student of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, the artist-to-be switched – after a disappointing first year – to reading English at Trinity College in Dublin. Reassured by a pragmatic postgraduate diploma in education, Berg followed his heart and enrolled at St Martin’s in London to pursue art, later deepening his studies at the Chelsea School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art.
In 1961, Berg moved to Gloucester Gate in London’s Regent’s Park, where he set up his studio. This minor event turned out to have a huge impact on the career of this artist who wholeheartedly committed his life, vocation and skill to painting his favourite parks, among which Regent’s Park holds an undeniably special place. Berg was fortunate enough to be able to observe and study the park from his apartment window. This notion of point of view, of angle, of approach is very important. If one looks at a Berg landscape, one will notice complementary perspectives laid across the canvas, following a semi-rigid left/right/up/down grid format. This multi-perspective approach is quite unique, as although they are perceived simultaneously by the viewer, these perspectives are not superimposed as in Cubism, for example.
Berg dedicated 25 years to assiduously painting view after view of Regent’s Park from his window. It was only after a quarter of a century that his subject matter broadened to include the vast panoramas around Derwent Water in the Lake District, the glass houses and trees at Kew and Syon, the Moorish gardens of the Alhambra, the reflections in the lakes at Sheffield Park and Stourhead and the flora and fauna of the Sussex coastline.
A firm believer in the power of figurative art and the heights it could reach as an artistic approach, Berg perused representational emotion rather than the dominating trends of his epoch. Despite this risky choice, the landscape painter enjoyed acclaim and accolades from peers and institutions alike. He won the gold medal at the Florence Biennale in 1973. In 1986, The Serpentine Gallery held a major retrospective of his work, which subsequently toured the country. In 1992, he was elected as a Royal Academician, and in 1994 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art.
Berg was as passionate a teacher as he was a painter. He taught at Camberwell, Central and the Royal College of Art, where students such as Tracy Emin became friends and then artistic figures in their own right.
Berg passed away in 2011.
