Thomas Berding: Projections in the deluge

EXHIBITION DATES: March 31 – April 25, 2026

RECEPTION: Thursday, april 2, 5 - 8 pm

 The Painting Center is pleased to present Projections in the Deluge, a solo exhibition of recent work by Thomas Berding in the main gallery and project room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, March 31, and runs through Saturday, April 25, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 2, from 5 to 8 pm. 

This exhibition continues the artist’s decades-long exploration of painting as a space for re-ambiguating the world through collapsing histories and categorical understandings. By creating speculative environments that combine observations of contemporary life with biographical material, Berding positions painting as a field where memory, culture, and personal experience intersect. 

Each painting in this series begins with inkjet images drawn from oft-overlooked cultural and personal ephemera. In any given painting, he might draw from third-class mailings, screen captures from web searches, iPhone snapshots taken in shopping aisles, or vernacular images reflecting his experience of growing up and living in the postindustrial Midwest. Themes of loss, memory, and recovery emerge from these fragments and are further developed through Berding’s inventive deployment of varied painting techniques and surfaces, including the collaging of paint skins and remnants from his own palettes. 

The resulting paintings possess a distinctly lived-in aesthetic, carrying visible traces of their own making. At the same time, they present dense layers of references and materials organized with an idiosyncratic logic that invites exploration while resisting any fixed interpretive framework. 

Responding to the deluge of information and material surplus that define contemporary life—as well as the persistence of memory—Berding’s works highlight the presence of the past within the present. In doing so, they affirm the aesthetic potential of reuse and the role art plays in processing experience and in constructing imagined futures. 

Thomas Berding was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His paintings have been widely exhibited and recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and NEA/Mid America Arts Alliance. Berding currently lives and works in East Lansing where he is a Professor of Studio Art at Michigan State University. 

For more information on the artist, visit thomasberding.com