Adrian Berg

Adrian Berg was born in London in 1929. He was educated at Charterhouse and Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He studied art in London, first at Central St Martin’s, then Chelsea College of Arts and finally at the Royal College of Art. Later he would go on to teach at the Royal College, becoming senior tutor in 1987. Berg’s paintings have been exhibited in all major UK institutions including, amongst many others the Tate, Hayward Gallery, Royal Academy, Victoria & Albert Museum, Fitzwilliam and Pallant House Gallery. In 1986, The Serpentine Gallery and the Arts Council held a major retrospective of Berg’s work which subsequently toured the country. He has also exhibited extensively internationally.

In 1992, he was elected as a Royal Academician, and in 1994 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art. It was in his own studies at the RCA in the early 1960s that Berg first found attention as an artist of rare talent and vision – and where he first became a prominent influence on his peers, including R.B Kitaj and David Hockney. His work is held in many private and public collections, including the Arts Council Collection, the Tate, the Government Art Collection, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His work will be the subject of a solo show at Frestonian Gallery in 2023, and a major museum retrospective in the UK in 2024/5. Berg passed away in 2011 at the age of 82.

One of the most innovative and ultimately influential landscape painters of his generation, he has been underserved and underrecognized by those outside of circles who were variously inspired by or taught by him. His exhibition at SFA Advisory, is his first commercial show in the US, centers on perhaps the most liberal and immediate output of his career: the sketches and watercolors he produced en plein air while immersed in the parklands, gardens, and coastlines of England.