Bjerger's images - varied scenes executed in loose, vivid gestures - pose puzzles for the viewer. Painted from photographs rather than from life, their subjects are derived from out-of-date reference books, instruction manuals, gardening books and magazines, possessing little overtly in common with one another. Their feeling is both familiar and anonymous, intimate yet curiously disconnected. Unmoored from their original contexts and unsettling each other's narratives, the images' meanings become slippery and ambiguous.
Bjerger's pictures call attention to the physicality of their medium. Paint is applied wet on wet in broad brushstrokes, building to areas of thick impasto, to drips that slide down unchecked and to painterly surfaces detached from their images' contents. The speed with which the works have been painted seem to strive after the instantaneous quality of photography yet all the while assert the transformative nature of painting.
Anna Bjerger studied at Central St. Martins School of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art, London, and lives and works in Sweden.
