We all have passions and activities that we love. Rarely are these hidden from view or known only to a closely-connected few. For Bernard Gilardi, a printing company dot etcher, his secret passion was painting. For over forty years, he would descend into his Milwaukee basement and paint. He never exhibited his work, nor did anyone ever visit and evaluate his output until after his death in 2008.

What his stunning output of almost 400 works reveals is an artist both very much aware of his times and environment as well as what other artists were doing; he may not have been part of the Milwaukee art scene, but his obsessive maintenance of clippings, notes and sketches prove he was very much aware of what was going on beyond the basement. Essentially self-taught, Gilardi’s work deals with such subjects as race relations, American history, fantasy, sexuality, portraiture and personal experience. His remarkable sense of imagination, use of color and surrealism make Gilardi one of the most remarkable artistic finds in recent years and places him firmly in the firmament of “outsider” Wisconsin artists.

This is the first major museum exhibition of Bernard Gilardi’s paintings and the MWA would like to thank Mary Gilardi, her family, and Debra Brehmer of the Portrait Society Gallery for making this show possible.

Packaging crowds the visual backdrop of our day-to-day routine and Alison Stehlik is very interested in the role that branding plays in the evolution of our collective personal identities. Her work is an exploration of how commodity is reflected in our personal identity, but is it also sort of a psychological experiment; to what degree can a brand be abstracted and still be readable? How much has branding and design impacted our perception of symbols in this world?

In a series of mixed media sculptures, Lisa Koch encapsulates short moments in time. Koch’s work is created in glass and accentuated by wood and metal, and her inspirations often come from the analytical world of the sciences.

Artist’s statement: “Einstein’s theories tell us that there is no absolute platform from which to view the universe: ‘the present is a parochial concept, valid for each observer, but with a different meaning for any observer in any other inertial frame.’ I use the ideas of perspective and rearrangement as a foundation in my recent work. Data is rearranged, molecules recombine, memory fades and refocuses. I use glass as a medium to speak of these changes because glass is inextricably connected with light, and light is at the foundation of our visual perception of reality. Glass has the ability to reflect, distort, obscure, exaggerate or duplicate, just like time.

Much of my work uses reflection: reflection of the viewer into the work, as well as reflection (duplication) within the work itself, often using the inherent properties of glass as a medium. I use float glass in many of my pieces to reflect images behind or within it, negative space carved within it, and viewers who walk around it. When viewed through the lens of glass, images and people shift and change, symbolic of how they change over time.

The cloud imagery in my work is symbolic of the travel of matter (in this case, water) around the earth, without knowing its history. Imagine how water moves around the earth - how did that glass of water travel to be in front of you? One molecule may have rained down in India, flowed to the ocean, swirled around for decades, evaporated into a cloud, and rained down in California where it was purified and bottled. My work investigates these processes and the mixing of information that takes place.

Consider this fact: with each breath you take, at least one molecule of that breath was once a part of Cesar’s very last breath. On this small blue planet, we are all much more interconnected than we often realize.”

Bound by the common task of working on the enormous panorama paintings, over a dozen German artists arrived in Milwaukee in the 1880s, creating some of the most impressive works of art ever painted in the US. This exhibition features work by Biberstein, Heine, Fery, Lorenz, Schneider and Schroeter, directly related to either the panoramas or their subsequent careers within Wisconsin and beyond.