Anna-Eva Bergman: From North to South, Rhythms

The private foundation Per Amor a l’Art presents From North to South, Rhythms at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art (València, Spain), a solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987) curated by Nuria Enguita and Christine Lamothe. 

This exhibition presents a selection of works by Bergman which she made from 1962 to 1971, coinciding with a series of trips she took to Spain and Norway. These journeys led to a permanent dialogue between north and south in her landscapes, which are formally similar but offer a very different depiction of light. The exhibition includes five pieces from the Per Amor a l’Art Collection, advised by Vicente Todolí. Born in Norway, but working mostly in Paris and Antibes, in 1962 the artist visited Carboneras, in Almería. This journey would become decisive, as it is where she started to make her first horizons, a motif she retook later on when she came in contact again with the Norwegian landscapes. Stones, another of Bergman’s motifs, had originated after a trip she took to Norway in 1951, and this motif then found continuity when she travelled through the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, as evidenced by her series “Stones of Castile” (1970). The artist made many photographs during these travels, which she used as a trace, as a memory or memento. Therefore the landscapes were portrayed from a great distance between the painting and the perception, which changed with the passing of time. Along with stones and horizons, in this show we find most of the motifs in Bergman’s painting: cliffs, fiords, stars, mountains and boats.

The pictorial construction tends to transcend the surface through the immediacy of the form, the use of large formats or the superposition of layers of different materials, such as metal foil, gold leaf and copper. These materials cover a previous thick layer of paint or, in some cases, the artist used varnish to change its appearance and give greater density to the paint. Resorting to those materials, together with the use of shapes, lines and colours, is what Bergman considered the “rhythm,” a structural element essential for painting. The layers intermix and modify the perception of colour depending on the light. This technique provides relief and a drawing which is only visible with the luminous reflections of the metal, creating a physical experience of the painting which translates into the finite the feeling of infiniteness. Her intense relationship with the landscape ultimately focuses on the elements which make up and animate nature (air, fire, water, earth) in an attempt to trap immateriality in the materiality of the work.

This tendency towards opening up the pictorial space places the artist within the line of landscape representation characteristic of North American painters such as Mark Rothko, with whom Bergman was very familiar, and also within the tradition of northern European Romanticism. Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner expressed experiences such as the infinite or the divine through landscape as the best expression of “the sublime”. As with abstract expressionism, Bergman’s work allows us to find in abstraction the experience of the infinite which the romantic painters found in nature.

On the occasion of this exhibition organised by Bombas Gens Centre d’Art and by the Fondation Hartung-Bergman, a catalogue will be published by Fundació Per Amor a l’Art, with texts by Romain Mathieu, Teresa Lanceta and Michael Tarantino, among others.