BRADWOLFF PROJECTS AMSTERDAM - September 27 - October 17, 2026
Carl Berg
Chromatic Syntax (The Color and Shape of Language)
Bradwolff Projects presents Chromatic Syntax, a solo exhibition by Carl Berg, on view from 27 September through 17 October 2026. The exhibition opens on Sunday, 27 September, from 4 to 6 pm.
The exhibition brings together three interconnected bodies of work from Berg’s ongoing investigation of language and image: the Album series, the Mashup series, and the Intrusion series.
The origins of Berg’s text-based work can be traced to 2012, when he began collecting words and phrases from reviews and critical texts in Artforum. Removed from the context in which they originally appeared, these fragments of art-critical language became material to be manipulated visually. Words were stretched, layered, fragmented, repeated, and reorganized until their function as language began to give way to shape, rhythm, and pattern.
An important development in this process was With a Little Help from My Friends, Berg’s 2016 solo exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum. For that project, Berg asked artists, curators, critics, collectors, family members, and friends to name their favorite music album. He then used lyrics and musical notation from those selections as source material, digitally stretching, layering, fragmenting, and reorganizing them into abstract compositions.
The resulting Album series, included in Chromatic Syntax at Bradwolff Projects, extended Berg’s interest in transforming language into image. Material originally intended to be read, sung, or heard became something primarily to be seen. Words became shapes, musical notation became pattern, and the familiar structure of language gave way to color, rhythm, and composition.
Berg continued this investigation in the Mashup series. In these works, textual, musical, and graphic material from different sources is brought together and recombined using photo-editing software . Elements that originally had no relationship to one another are layered, and altered until they form new visual structures. The original sources remain partially recognizable, while their identities become increasingly unstable.
This approach developed further in the Intrusion series. Here, Berg’s abstract patterns enter photographic images of architecture, urban environments, fashion, and the human figure. Rather than simply sitting on the surface of the photograph, the patterns interrupt and transform it, creating a tension between the recognizable world of the photograph and an imposed digital structure.
The pattern becomes an intrusion—something simultaneously foreign to the original image and inseparable from it.
These works grew out of Berg’s longstanding relationship with photography and digital image-making. Photography was the principal focus of his artistic practice for many years, first through film and later digitally. Over time, Photoshop changed from a means of correcting or manipulating photographs into a tool for constructing entirely new images. Berg stretches, cuts, shifts, layers, repeats, and abrades digital material until the original source begins to lose its identity.
Across the Album, Mashup, and Intrusion series, language remains a recurring source, but it is rarely left intact. Words, lyrics, musical notation, photographs, and patterns are repeatedly taken apart and reconstructed. Meaning is not eliminated entirely, but becomes unstable. Text begins to operate as image, while image begins to function like a kind of visual syntax.
There is an inherent irony in this process. Material originally created to communicate something directly—whether through criticism, lyrics, notation, or photography—is transformed into something more ambiguous. Its original authority gives way to color, rhythm, scale, repetition, and composition.
The title Chromatic Syntax reflects this transformation. Syntax normally describes the arrangement of words into meaningful structures. Here, syntax is reconstructed visually. Color, form, repetition, fragmentation, and spatial relationships take the place of conventional grammar.
By presenting the Album, Mashup, and Intrusion series together, Chromatic Syntax traces the development of Berg’s practice from text as source material to increasingly complex combinations of language, photography, pattern, and abstraction.
Berg does not make images of language; he makes language into image.
Carl Berg (1960, Los Angeles) is an artist, photographer, curator, and gallery owner. He has developed his artistic practice for more than forty years, initially working primarily with photography, first on film and later digitally. Alongside his artistic practice, Berg has been active in exhibition-making and founded PRJCTLA in Los Angeles, while previously operating galleries in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. His projects have included exhibitions with artists such as Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, Tim Hawkinson, Aernout Mik, and Folkert de Jong, and have been presented in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul, Rotterdam, and elsewhere.
