Paul Caponigro: Seeing With My Heart
On Friday 22 October, we hosted exhibition curator and friend, Carl Herbert, Artist Paul Caponigro, and Gallery Director, Bernie Pucker for an enlightening and encouraging conversation on Paul’s work.
Dr. Carl Herbert is a fourth-generation physician whose career has been devoted to helping infertility patients overcome a wide spectrum of obstacles to create their families. Early in his career, he participated in the founding of one of the first eIVF centers in the United States. For more than forty years, Dr. Herbert has contributed to the growth and development of assisted reproductive technologies, continually implementing the evolving techniques, and optimizing their clinical applications for care. The ambiguity of a socially awkward accolade, “You got me pregnant !”, has become a recurrent reward, both humorous and joyful.
By serendipity, Dr. Herbert walked into the Pucker gallery for the first time in 1985 when visiting Boston for a medical conference. From this point on, his nascent interest in art grew under the generous tutelage and encouragement of Mr. Pucker. A close personal friendship evolved as they visited artists and exhibitions around the world; exchanged thoughts on the experience and intrinsic value that art, in all its many forms, can provide individuals and society; and shared writings that illuminated these principles.
Dr. Herbert has become an avid and passionate collector of art, including paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, and photographs. Inspired by the human dimension of his clinical work, and the very origins of human life, his collection includes many works focused on the egg form or egg shape. Among these egg-themed pieces are exquisite works of ceramic, crystal, and wooden forms, paintings, prints, and an extensive group of silver gelatin photographs displaying the unique symmetry and suggestive beauty of the egg. His goal, in some semblance to Paul Caponigro, is to discover and preserve the spiritual aspect of life found in these pieces.