RICHARD BERNSTEIN, Black Jello Heart, 1969

RICHARD BERNSTEIN, Black Jello Heart, 1969
Black Jello Heart, 2022, Design by Calle Henzel
Edition of 10
Numbered
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity
Hand knotted rug
Wool & Silk
High / Low Cut

Richard Bernstein (1939–2002) was an American artist whose work became synonymous with the visual language of late twentieth-century Pop culture. Best known for his iconic covers for Interview magazine — founded by Andy Warhol in 1969 — Bernstein developed a highly distinctive style that fused glamour, celebrity, and graphic immediacy with the sensibilities of fine art. His portraits, rendered in saturated color, sharp contour, and dramatic cosmetic sheen, captured the theatricality of fame while simultaneously reflecting on its construction through media and image-making.

Working alongside key figures of the Pop Art movement, Bernstein embraced techniques drawn from commercial illustration, advertising, and fashion publishing, translating them into a painterly vocabulary that blurred distinctions between mass communication and high art. His works celebrate and scrutinize the aesthetics of excess, artifice, and visibility that defined the cultural landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to a broader reconsideration of how celebrity and identity are staged and consumed.

Henzel Studio’s collaboration with the Richard Bernstein Estate presents a focused engagement with this legacy. The work Black Jello Heart, 1969 is reinterpreted as Black Jello Heart, 2022, translated into textile by Calle Henzel. In this rearticulation, Bernstein’s graphic sensibility — its bold contrasts, fluid contours, and sense of visual immediacy — is rendered through hand-knotted structure, allowing color, sheen, and surface to assume a tactile dimension. The transformation underscores the affinity between Bernstein’s embrace of commercial materiality and Henzel’s interest in process, adaptation, and the migration of images across media.

Bernstein’s work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Through this collaboration, his work is re-situated within a contemporary material context, extending its dialogue between art, fashion, and popular culture.

Images: (1) Black Jello Heart, 1969 (2) Richard Bernstein, portrait (3) Interview cover. Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Bernstein.