Bernice Luftie Sorge Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1943 -

Born in 1943 in Truro, Nova Scotia, to parents of Syrian origin, Bernice Lutfie Sorge lived in British Columbia and in several Latin American countries before settling in Quebec. Being the daughter of an immigrant mother, I have never really known what "home" means. She has lived in Quebec's Eastern Townships for more than 20 years now.

This painter and engraver, who describes herself as an "explorer," began her career with landscape painting, only to progressively distance herself from it and involve herself in a more conceptual and experimental process. After earning a Bachelor's degree in visual arts from Montreal's Concordia University, she moved to the country to work directly from nature.

I gather things from the woods . . . I have always had the desire to create something from nothing. This desire was inspired by her mother, a figure who occupied and still occupies a central place in a process in which the question of identity has always been present. Art has been a marvellous thing for me. It is through art that I have explored my roots, my origins. I have plunged deeper and deeper into the very matter of art, by using materials that come directly from the earth, from the woods.

For Bernice Lutfie Sorge, questions are more important than answers, and it is those questions that she tries to formulate in her installations, her canvases and her engravings, questions that should reach out to everyone: I love to transform things, and even to transmute them; to make them, in a sense, accessible to everyone. When I do something, I always want to bring it to some sort of universal conclusion . . . although, as far as I am concerned, nothing is ever quite finished.

Founder of the Centre d'art Missisquoi in Dunham and L'Estampille printmaking studio, she is a member of the Conseil québécois de l'estampe and of the Conseil de la peinture du Québec. She has to her credit numerous exhibitions in Canada and in France, and her works are found in many public and private collections.

" What is it like to be born of a place, to stay and live there, to know that you are of it (Edward Said) ... and of another place, a fantasy place, born of a mother's memory?"

"We were compensated in our most difficult times by our mother's stories that transported us to Syria, to her childhood. Her village near Damascus became an ideal place in my mind. [...]

This dichotomy of the two villages, mine and hers, reality a nd myth, provided an in-between world for me, a world which consisted of both places. My imagination was stimulated by a desire to make everything one, to find wholeness, to solve the mystery of difference. How can these two worlds meet, what is the same about them? My quest became existential."

"The large wooden frame that surrounds the prints was created by one of my Syrian mother's grandsons [...]. This view, within a frame, gives perspective and distance and brings us back to the here and now [...]. "