New York City - Known for collages with kaleidoscopic surfaces of fractured forms and space, Romare Bearden captured in his layered narratives the essence of African American life.  Romare Bearden - Fractured Tales: Intimate Collages, the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, presents thirteen collages completed between 1965 to 1981.  Each collage was selected for their intimate scale.  Subjects included range from southern rural life to Harlem street scenes, Caribbean sites & vegetation to musical improvisations.  On view to October 28, 2006, this exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated, color catalogue featuring a reprint of the 1968 Romare Bearden essay “Rectangular Structure in my Montage Paintings.”  Visuals are available upon request.

Romare Bearden was born in 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina and studied at Boston University, New York University (B.A. 1935), the Art Students League (1936-37) with George Grosz, and Columbia University.  During the 1930s, Bearden was involved with 306, an art school and workshop in Harlem where his cousin by marriage, Charles Alston, was a leading instructor.  From 1942 to 1945, Bearden served in the United States Army and in 1950, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris, where he studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne and met, among others, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Miró.  He was a founding member of Spiral group (1963), a co-founder with Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow of the Cinque Gallery (1969) - a non-profit organization that showed the work of minority artists, and an active founding member of The Studio Museum in Harlem (1968).  Bearden’s early work belongs to the school of social realism, but after his return from Europe his images became more abstract.