The Monmouth Museum’s New Jersey Emerging Artists Series continues with an exhibition of paper sculpture by artist Riccardo Berlingeri of Middletown.
“Fenestra Florealis” The exhibit will continue through May 30 in the Nilson Gallery at the museum, located on the campus of Brookdale Community College in the Lincroft section of Middletown.
Berlingeri’s works are created entirely from newspapers, recycled and transformed into large paper sculptures that preserve the medium’s unique properties. He collects and carefully sorts pages of newsprint (specifically The New York Times) for color and content, then rolls and glues the pages to create his sculptures. No paint, special treatments or chemical preservatives are used in the process, in keeping with the artist’s environmental focus: “What I have borrowed from nature will eventually return to it in time.”
“Wheel” Newspapers are both the medium and the subject of his creations. Berlingeri celebrates the peculiar qualities of newspapers in his sculptures while also exploring content.
“I perceive all aspects of a newspaper’s content: stories, images and advertisements as fragmentary manifestations of our social structure of values, beliefs and aesthetics; as fragments of a whole, they define the identity of our society,” he states. The New Jersey Emerging Artists Series, now in its fourth season at the Monmouth Museum, features six annual exhibitions that provide an opportunity for New Jersey artists to showcase their work. The artists selected for this series represent the diversity of new talent in the state. Hours are 10 a.m.-4:30
p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $7, children under 2, museum members and Brookdale students and staff with valid I.D. are admitted free.
For more information, call the museum at 732-747-2266, or visit the www.monmouthmuseum. org.