Richard Benari talks to painter Siri Berg about her work which will be on view at with Hionas Gallery at Volta, New York, March 6-9, 2014.

Benari notes that: "works daily, making drawings and paintings that are, at first glance, deceptively simple, but in the real show a concern for surface, light and color that extends the conversation begun by Minimalism. And, breaking with Minimalist doctrine, Siri insists that the artist needs to be 'there' in the work. She mixes and tubes her own paint, and lays down colors 'that don’t exist out there,' in nature. … she works with a reduced palette–just nine colors; a rule that guides her practice–and because the values of her multi-panel works are so close, a sense of space is evoked, a sense of shadow and depth. Combine this concern for illusionistic space with Siri’s interest in making actual shadow part of the work (each of her more recent canvases sit on 3' supports; the resulting distance from the wall creates a very definite shadow that makes each panel pop) and the trajectory is clear: 'I’m not saying I’m going to start making sculpture,' Siri says, 'but I’m very interested in how sculptural the thing is, and how things that are sculptural affect the environment in which they are seen. It’s light, it’s architecture–these are the things that interest me now.'"