Anna-Eva Bergman — Peintures : 1977-1987 — Poggi Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 28 → August 23, 2014

Anna-Eva Bergman — Galerie Jérôme Poggi Depuis une vingtaine d’années, on n’avait plus vu d’œuvres d’Anna-Eva Bergman à Paris. La galerie Jérôme Poggi, avec les prêts exce... 2 - Bien Critique

Born in 1909, twice married to Hans Hartung with whom she experienced a passionate relationship throughout their lives, Anna-Eva Bergman has profited for several years now from a significant increase in critical and artistic importance. Given she had been recognized during her lifetime, representing for example Norway in the São Paulo Biennale in 1969 and honored by a major retrospective at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1977, her work had remained marginal for a long time in the eyes of the critics and historians. Apart from the fact that she was a woman artist and the wife of an artist at a time when art history was essentially a man’s domain, it’s above all the uniqueness of her work and of her artistic trajectory that had partially hidden its importance with an essentially progressive approach to art history following the war.

As Annie Claustres described it, “the remarkable body of work of Anna-Eva Bergman […] does not fit within the linear history of the avant-gardes. The use of materials, such as gold and/or silver leaf combined with that of paint, and an attachment to the symbolic position of revealing a metaphysical conception to landscape, offsets it in relation to the major aesthetic challenges of the 20th century.”

It’s undoubtedly the reason why her work so resonates on the contemporary art scene where she is often confronted with living artists’ works. Situated just there where “abstraction meets nature” as the art historian Ole Henrik Moe has emphasized, her body of work is striking indeed by its contemporaneity as well as its universality.

This exhibition, the first in Paris in almost twenty years, regroup a rare set of fifteen works carried out between 1977, date of her major retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and 1987, year of her death.

As part of a close partnership with the Hans Hartung / Anna-Eva Bergman Foundation, the show was jointly curated by Jérôme Poggi and Christine Lamothe, responsible for the work of Bergman at the Foundation.