Dien Berziga (b. 2001, Beijing, China) spent his childhood and teenage years moving between continents, rarely staying more than five years in one place. He passed through Beijing, Parma, Sanya, Torquay, and New York before arriving in London, where he now lives. New destinations brought new encounters – with relatives, teachers, neighbours, and even time spent with nuns – each with their own customs, rituals, and ways of moving through the world. New departures demanded a renegotiation of culture and habits and, over time, accumulated into an acquired sensibility for the diverse ways that people carry their direct lived experience with them.
Berziga graduated from Central Saint Martins, London, in 2023 and has painted compulsively ever since. Over a short time, he has developed a visual language that is unmistakably his own: sombre in tone with occasional dense passages of colour, sometimes integrating older materials, and sometimes constructing newly made frames that parse classical architectural forms drawn from global sites of worship. His paintings are predominantly atmospheric, populated by half-hidden figures and fragments of landscape, into which geometric shapes arbitrarily appear.
Recent exhibitions in London and Europe include Studio/Chapple, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation and Liliya Gallery. Cuccurucucù, Berziga’s debut solo exhibition with Tache, will open from May 22 through June 25 in London.