Every time I close my eyes

Anna Bjerger

10 Eyl 2011
15 Eki 2011

The pictures of Anna Bjerger 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.

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Man with light - By Anna Bjerger, found on Gabriel Rolt. This image was used to illustrate an article about the exhibition 'Every Time I Close My Eyes' by Anna Bjerger. Anna Bjerger

With:

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.

Opening

Saturday 10th of September, 17.00 – 20.00 hrs