From North to South, Rhythms / Anna-Eva Bergman

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Nov 14, 2018 – May 5, 2019

Bombas Gens

Anna-Eva Bergman / ADAGP, Paris, 2018 / Per Amor a l’Art Collection

To speak of Anna-Eva Bergman’s trips to Spain implies taking an interest in her holidays, looking seriously into that different time, the time outside the studio, which is nonetheless at the heart of the artist’s approach and proves to be essential to understand her oeuvre. If Anna-Eva Bergman considered for a moment moving to Spain with Hans Hartung to build an atelier and re-connect with the setting of their first years as a couple in Menorca, she was foremost attracted to a place. “Carboneras, still wild and unchanged, only inhabited by peasants, fishermen and bohemians, as Hans and I liked it” It was distance, then, that characterized this place, and that was what Anna-Eva Bergman was looking for, a distance in regards to the contemporary world and to life in Paris, where the artist had her studio. Her first trip, in 1962, coincided with the appearance of the Horizons, a motif which effected a transformation in the artist’s work and would become recurrent until the end of her life. She returned there in the company of Hans Hartung almost every year, in 1963, 1964, 1966, 1970 and 1971. In 1970, Bergman reviewed her entire vocabulary of shapes with India ink on large pieces of white paper. This repertory was completed with the series Pierres de Castille (Stones of Castile) made with the same technique. This unusual series associated with that inventory indicates a passage, a moment of evolution that would materialize afterwards in the work she did in the atelier in Antibes. A decade went by between the first and last trip that Anna-Eva Bergman made to Spain. During this time the work of the artist experienced a transformation.

Anna-Eva Bergman / ADAGP, Paris, 2018 / Per Amor a l’Art Collection

Anna-Eva Bergman’s painting is inseparable from that experience of the world and from the enigma of its existence, both a wall erected in front of us and a horizon line that flees in the distance. That enigma materializes both in the farthest and in the nearest in the series of Astres (Stars) as well as in Pierres de Castille, whose burst of dark masses extracts itself from the limits of the medium and exceeds the gaze. For the artist, Spain was an essential place for that experience and she associated it, as a counterpoint, with Norway. It is part of this movement of comings and goings between the studio and the world, where one is not confused with the other; all the contrary, it reveals a distance which is at the source of Anna-Eva Bergman’s painting.

–Romain Mathieu / Anna-Eva Bergman in Spain, Comings and Goings

Anna-Eva Bergman / ADAGP, Paris, 2018 / Per Amor a l’Art Collection

Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-1987) is a Norwegian artist who considers the “rhythm” such a painting essential structural element, a rhythm resulting from the use of certain materials – metal sheets, gold leaf, silver or copper – forms, lines and colors. Her work undergoes a radical turn from the 50s, when she focuses on pictorial abstraction. The landscape then becomes the essential reference of her work: natural motifs, Scandinavian mythology – stones, planets, mountains, boats – or Norwegian light. Her relationship with Spain began in 1933, when she settled for a year in Menorca with her partner, Hans Hartung. The trip to Andalusia in 1962 will be, however, the most decisive for her work: there she begins to elaborate her first horizons, a motif that she will resume when contacting with the Norwegian landscapes. This link between Norway and Spain – north and south – leads to a similar formality between both landscapes, which acquire, on the other hand, very different tonalities. The stone motifs it is also fundamental in the artist, which began to develop in 1951 on her trip to Norway and took over in the early seventies to travel the interior of the peninsula, as testified by her series “Stones of Castile.”

From North to South, Rhythms / Anna-Eva Bergman
November 14, 2018 – May 5, 2019 / Bombas Gens
Curated by Nuria Enguita and Christine Lamothe
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