David Bierk

David Charles Bierk RCA (June 9, 1944 – August 28, 2002) was an American-Canadian realist painter known for working in the postmodern genre.

[3][1] Initially he studied at California College of Arts & Crafts,[4][5] Bierk dropped out after a year and half, and as he described it, "...I took off, hitchhiked across the country, ended up in Florida, and then caught a boat to the Bahamas....I got a job as librarian at...Mary Star of the Sea School, a Catholic grammar school, where I persuaded Sister Mary Alice to let me teach art as well.

[3] Along with poet Dennis Tourbin, Bierk founded and directed Artspace between 1974 and 1987, which was one of Canada's earliest artist operated art centers.

In a June 2001 Art in America review, critic Jonathan Goodman wrote that "Bierk quotes from the past not so much to critique current art as to reinterpret a way of seeing that he associates with artists as disparate as Vermeer, Eakins, Ingres, Manet and Fantin-Latour....[Bierk] accomplishes this particularly well when he starkly juxtaposes two or three of his eclectic art-historical references within a single work.

[10] Both Goodman's review and Bierk's 2002 New York Times obituary note that Bierk used framing to call attention, in a way that is pointedly "postmodern", to the historical disjunction between the evoked masterworks and the contemporary cultural environment: "He painted copies of works by artists like Vermeer or the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, for example, and framed them within broad steel panels, setting up a tension between humanism and old masterly craft on the one hand, and Modernist abstraction and industrial fabrication on the other.

His sons Sebastian Bach is the former lead singer for the rock group Skid Row and Zac Bierk is a former professional ice hockey player.