Join us as we visit painter Anna Bjerger at her home in Sweden, where she talks about how she paints from old, anonymous photographs, and what that means for her as an artist: “You can’t fake it. You’ve got to have genuine feeling for this image.”
“The transformation from photograph to painting is like the magic moment.” A lot of Bjerger’s imagery is from old books, such as travel guides and instruction manuals, which have been made redundant by time.
Anna Bjerger (b. 1973) is a Swedish painter, whose starting point is other people’s pictures. Bjerger paints with quick strokes against a background of anonymous photographs of objects, landscapes and people – thus reworking something that has already been pictorialized before it reaches her. Bjerger has exhibited in Europe and the US, including David Risley Gallery in Copenhagen and Dublin Contemporary.
Anna Bjerger was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at her home in Småland, Sweden in February 2016. In the interview Bjerger discusses her painting ‘Filter’ (2011), where the main motif of a smiling woman holding up a colour chart is repeated 23 times with changing colours.
Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Edited and produced by: Kasper Bech Dyg
Cover photo: Two details from ‘Filter’ (2011) by Anna Bjerger
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2016
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