It is with great pleasure that Galleri Bo Bjerggaard presents the exhibition Drifters with 14 new works by the Swedish painter, Anna Bjerger. This is Bjerger’s second solo show at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard.

Anna Bjerger finds her motifs via a vast image archive. While the motifs can appear clear-cut and mundane, Bjerger highlights elements through the painting process that lift the motif out of its prosaic context. In her search for motifs, it is Bjerger’s subjective experience and the act of seeing that comes into play.

Bjerger explains: “I try to bring forth the subjective, and at times confusing, act of seeing by taking a photograph and transmogrifying it through the act of painting. I have to believe in the picture for it to work as a painting and for it to be credible for everyone who looks at it. Of course, this is also subjective, and I don’t think of it in relation to realism, but rather how a gut feeling can be conveyed through the painting.”

In the catalogue text, art critic Francesca Astesani writes: “In fact, many of the motifs Bjerger chooses to paint have the quality of what we look at when we are thinking of something else: the detail of a posture, how trousers fold over a pair of leather shoes or shadows meet a wall.”

When the motif is transferred to the painting, this takes place via the formal elements in a painting. Anna Bjerger states: “I’m interested in how the dirty brown soil can be activated, or how the geometric shapes in the rushes play with your eyes when you look at them. I want to know what would happen to the picture of a pike, which lay hidden from our eyes at the bottom of a lake, if it were magnified and transposed into a very large painting.”