Tom Berenz is an accomplished young painter and professor at the University of Wisconsin. His paintings have been exhibited nationally and featured in multiple publications, most notably, New American Paintings and Huffington Post. Tom has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Best Painting Award NWC Biennale – National Weather Center, 2013, and MFA Joan Mitchell, University of Wisconsin – Madison, WI, 2012. His work “blurs the line between abstraction and realism” and fuses personal experiences with sociopolitical, environmental, and ideological issues. Tom investigates the language and possibilities of two-dimensional space through his work, often using the motif of disaster as a metaphor. His paintings are complex and beautiful, as they delicately balance the line between organization and chaos. In his statement Tom explains, “By re-establishing a different logic within the painting itself, I investigate how a painting can sit in a place that can only happen in a two-dimensional space. I explore the in-between space that is neither real nor artifice, life nor landscape, natural nor artificial, messy nor clean, flat nor deep, and dynamic nor static.” 

“My work deals with the architecture, patterning, and symbols of mythical and theoretical origins. I use multicultural religiously based patterns and naturally occurring patterns to construct images of mythical and biblical creatures, subtle invisible phenomena, theoretical shapes of the universe, and microcosmic vibratory events. The formal aspects of my work involve a play between the illusion of space, actual physical space, and the two-dimensionality of the paper. In my cut paper works I use perspectival patterning that creates the illusion of form, flat patterning, and a physical cast shadow to show the actual space and thinness of the paper. It is my aim to create spatially complex work that is in conversation with ancient, canonical, modernist, and contemporary ideas of spatiality in art making.