Artist: Anna Bjerger

Galleri Magnus Karlsson presents Anna Bjerger’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Home Encyclopedia features new paintings made in the last year. In connection with the exhibition, a catalogue is produced in which the art critic Karin Faxén Sporrong has written an essay.

A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.
- Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, 1914

A garlic bulb. A well-thumbed housewife’s manual. Two noodles, cooked and shimmering white. A piece of cake, just about within reach. The very last lettuce leaf in the bowl.

Anna Bjerger’s paintings reveal a certain approach to the concrete and quotidian. What surrounds us and is there all the time. It appears to be the perfectly ordinary world that she chooses to portray. The objects and things as they are. But also a very singular eye that is not entirely easy to define. It is as if it were charged with amazement at the visible. As if we were seeing it for the first time. Every time.

After long having based her paintings on anonymous photographs, she started a couple of years ago to paint the reality around her, without intermediary photographs. There is an immediacy in how she works with the current visual world, which has not always been there. In the same process, she also made the format more monumental; an element that begs closer scrutiny of the motifs.

Painting is a balance between total presence in the now, and inevitable references to what has passed. The paintings in Home Encyclopedia are one result of that balancing act. We are reminded of art history whenever objects are portrayed in relation to space: the still life runs like an undercurrent throughout centuries of painting. At first glance, the paintings in this series may not seem to have much in common with the still lifes of Greco-Roman murals, 17th-century floral compositions or Baroque vanitas motifs. They are not about dramatic or strategic emphasis, displaying of material opulence. Instead, there is a kinship with Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes from the 1920s, an unassuming attitude and a meditative simplicity.

In some sense, the series grapples with the symbolically-laden arrangements of the distant past. The painting of the dead squirrel braces itself against triumphant representations of killed animals but complies with our contemporary humbled approach to nature.

Two mainstays of the classical still-life symbolism claim their rightful position, in a dominant format. But the only skeleton part in the series is not an elegant skull, but the cleaned carcass of a fish, as if ready for composting. And where the lobster was staged in sumptuous settings in the North European golden age, it is all alone here.

Anna Bjerger’s paintings fundamentally convey a serene and observant reflection on the concrete and visible. The things we surround ourselves with. The analogue, perhaps? An observation and a slow invocation of the immediate and immobile object. Painting in general, and the still life in particular, has always been a form of impossibility, like black magic; an obstruction of life and time, an act that turns the transience of life into an artificial now: whether this be the presence of a tea mug in a bed, a chocolate’s narrative, or an egg frying in a pan. It is about weighing up the situation. Repositioning objects to find the way, to create movement and balance in the picture. Reflecting on what space the objects are actually located in. There is no after or before. Nothing else, anywhere. There is only a seeing, characterised by expectation; a rare silence. The ordinary objects are the only reliable ones. A world may be in turmoil and all life may disappear in a cloud of dust. The objects remain. A small bottle of Cointreau. A bunch of dried flowers waiting in the nocturnal light. And the same bunch, in the light of day.

- Karin Faxén Sporrong

Translation: Gabriella Berggren

Anna Bjerger, b.1973 in Skallsjö, Sweden, lives and works in Småland and Malmö. She was educated at St. Martin’s School of Art and Design and The College of Art in London. Since then she has exhibited regularly in Sweden and internationally. Her most recent exhibition with Chantal Joffe was shown at Gammel Strand in Copenhagen and at Hellvi Kännungs, Gotland. Bjerger is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, SMK Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark, Sveriges Riksdag, Stockholm and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, among others, as well as in numerous private and public collections worldwide.