RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA.- The North Carolina Museum of Art presents "In Memoriam: George Bireline (1923 - 2002)," on view through August 3, 2004. Born in Peoria, Illinois in 1923, George Bireline became a central-and beloved-figure among North Carolina’s artists and arts appreciators. Though he rose to national prominence with his color-field paintings in the 1960s, Bireline chose to remain in his adopted state, teaching at the School of Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and creating a varied body of work during a lengthy and influential career. Over the decades Bireline moved from style to style-from Abstract Expressionism to color-field painting, from trompe l’oeil to social commentary to more personal, figurative works-always with an admirable coherence and facility. Throughout, Bireline teased viewers by using-and confusing-representation and abstraction, reality and illusion.

 

Bireline loved the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art and sometimes quoted from it in his own work. An example of such an appropriation is included in the exhibition, Bireline’s painting of Damian and Cosmas. Bireline based his portrayal on the NCMA’s fourteenth-century Italian painting of these physician saints. In his inimitable way, Bireline has layered in contemporary references and associations which viewers will enjoy decoding. As this selection of paintings demonstrates, the artist treats art history’s classic themes in his own luminously beautiful and engaging way.

 

Bireline served in the U.S. Army during World War II, studied cartoon art at Bradley University and completed his master’s degree in fine arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963. A sold-out exhibition at New York’s Andre Emmerich Gallery the following year marked the beginning of Bireline’s national prominence, and his works are currently in the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte and the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, among others. Important exhibitions of his work include the retrospective show Original Bireline at the N.C. Museum of Art in 1976 and The George Bireline Decade: 1984-1994 at the City Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1994. Bireline’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and the Southeast Artist Award of the National Council on the Arts in 1968. He taught in the North Carolina State University School of Design between 1955 and his retirement in 1986.