Anna Bjerger
dal 9/9/2011 al 14/10/2011
Segnalato da
9/9/2011
Anna Bjerger
Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam
'The starting point can be an image or a very strong notion of something that will run through the works. I think of it as laying a jigsaw puzzle where each piece is vital and the meaning disclosed at the end.' Anna Bjerger
Every Time I Close My Eyes: Swedish
painter Anna Bjerger's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Bjerger’s images —
varied scenes executed in loose, vivid gestures — pose puzzles for the viewer.
Painted from photographs rather than from life, their subjects are derived from
out-of-date reference books, instruction manuals, gardening books and magazines,
possessing little overtly in common with one another. Their feeling is both familiar
and anonymous, intimate yet curiously disconnected. Unmoored from their original
contexts and unsettling each other’s narratives, the images’ meanings become
slippery and ambiguous.
Bjerger’s pictures call attention to the physicality of their medium. Paint is
applied wet on wet in broad brushstrokes, building to areas of thick impasto, to
drips that slide down unchecked and to painterly surfaces detached from their
images’ contents. The speed with which the works have been painted seem to strive
after the instantaneous quality of photography yet all the while assert the
transformative nature of painting.
Every Time I Close My Eyes represents an entirely new body of work. Its motifs are
those that have appeared in painting through the ages — still lifes, landscapes,
portraits and nudes — and recall the works of particular artists. A full length
depiction of a contemporarily dressed woman whose skirt is made out of swirls of
blue paint summons the decorative portraits of Gustav Klimt, for instance, whilst
the girl in Edvard Munch’s Puberty is recast as a tan-marked woman bearing a blithe
expression on her face. Bjerger has described the subject of her paintings as the
‘tool’ with which to engage with the works, selecting images that exude ‘a boundless
quality as well as compositional strength.’ Similarly, the size of her pictures
(several in this exhibition are far larger than ever before) impact on the reading
of them: they demand to be looked at both from afar and up close, and from different
positions within the space, inviting a physical involvement from the viewer as the
exhibition is experienced as a whole. Through all of the means available to painting
— the handling of medium, composition and scale — Bjerger personalises her imagery,
compounding familiarity with further familiarity until it becomes strange.
Image: Anna Bjerger – SEATED, Oil on aluminum panel, 2011
Opening reception
Saturday 09 September, 17.00 – 19.30
Galerie Gabriel Rolt
Elandsgracht 34
1016 TW Amsterdam
Open: Wed — Sat | 12 — 18 hrs