PRESENTATION: Anna Bjerger-Home Encyclopedia

Anna Bjerger’s paintings take prosaic photographic images as a starting point. She elevates the images by removing them from their context and transforming them through the act of painting. We are invited to view the motif in a new light. Much like a sentence cut out from a text Bjerger’s paintings shift what we find valuable in the image and attempt to reveal previously unseen elements.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galleri Magnus Karlsson Archive

Anna Bjerger’s work can be said to describe a balance between extremes. It contains the psychological content of the image and the physical aspects of the painting. The narrative evolves, arriving at new meanings through the language of painting. Anna Bjerger’s in her solo exhibition “Home Encyclopedia” presents new paintings made in the last year. Her 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. 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.

Photo: Anna Bjerger, Stains, 2024, Oil on aluminium, 60×50 cm, © Anna Bjerger, Courtesy the artist and Galleri Magnus Karlsson

Info: Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 15/3-19/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com/