Bark Frameworks

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Framing Van Gogh

A few years ago we were asked to re-frame Van Gogh’s “The Night Café” for the Yale University Art Gallery.  Our frame presents “The Night Café” in an entirely new way–and the framing has been controversial.  Radical though the frame may appear, it is much closer to the artist’s intention than was its previous Louis XIV frame. Jared Bark wrote about Van Gogh’s interest in framing and an account of our experience in framing this painting. The article i...  Read More

Posted on May 20th, 2013

Framing Sharon Core

We have framed Sharon Core’s remarkable photographs before, but this was the first time we were asked to design a frame that references frames of the time of the Dutch still life paintings she so amazingly conjures up in her brilliant photographs.  The collector Philip Maritz sent us a couple of photographs of Dutch still lifes in seventeenth century frames and asked if we could do something in that vein.  Since Dutch frames of that period have been a singular insp...  Read More

Posted on May 20th, 2013

Ornament and Crime: Introduction

From our BLOG SERIES we introduce “Ornament and Crime,” a phrase coined in 1908 by Adolf Loos, Viennese architect, who was a polemicist and maybe a little mad. He declared:  "We have outgrown ornament; we have fought our way through to freedom from ornament.”To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece … which is covered ...  Read More

Posted on May 20th, 2013

Framing Xu Bing’s The Suzhou Landscripts

I first met the artist Xu Bing in the company of Judith Goldman and Shelagh Vainker.  Judith’s Deuce II Editions published his four panel lithographic work, and Shelagh is Curator at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Our meeting was at United Limited Art Edition’s studio on Long Island where the work was being printed; the project had been started there almost ten years before.  Over the next several months we made samples of prospective mouldings and sent them back an...  Read More

Posted on May 20th, 2013

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