Anna Bjerger

About Anna Bjerger

Anna Bjerger paints images taken from old travel books, DIY and gardening books and photographic manuals, largely bought in charity shops and jumble sales. Dated and discarded, images denuded of their original functionality are strangely elevated through the transformative process of painting.

Anna Bjerger paints images taken from old travel books, DIY and gardening books and photographic manuals, largely bought in charity shops and jumble sales. Dated and discarded, images denuded of their original functionality are strangely elevated through the transformative process of painting. She picks out images that, for her, manifest "a boundless quality as well as compositional strength." That boundless quality stems, in part, from the mixture of anonymity and familiarity that characterizes the subjects of the original photographs and allows countless narratives to be sensed, imagined and projected; a day on the beach, a photo-shoot, a magic trick at a children's party, boundless and frozen. The nature of photography carries with it an implication of the ephemeral and painting, the illusion of permanence. Bjerger's paintings carry a soft and subtle tension between these two imagined opposites with them. Above all, however, the subject of the work is the experience and practice of painting itself. As Bjerger explains, "Through painting I am able to shift the hierarchy in the image and bring forward a different version of the recorded instant. The physicality of the paint, the variable structure of the surface and the focus on dimension serves to intensify the experience of looking."

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