So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Late last night, while I was selecting pictures for this book, I got an email from the artist Anna Bjerger. I have promised to write a piece for a book of her pictures which she is publishing. She had attached a file containing thirty photographed paintings, so that I had something to refer to. I had seen many of them before, but some were new to me, among them a fantastic picture of a landscape of fields, it is viewed from straight above, as if from a plane, the colours are predominantly yellow, but also orange, brown and green, the whole picture glows with colour, and the pattern of fields leading away into the background creates a delightful pull and a depth in the otherwise utterly flat landscape. Another picture, just as fantastic, as glowing with colour and as dominated by large fields, depicts a greenish ocean and a grey concrete pier where a boy in swimming trunks is sitting, his back is turned to the viewer, this motif too is viewed from above, at a slight angle. But my absolute favourite is the painting of a woman swimming underwater, the greenish and dizzying underwater space in it, the world of light one senses above her but cannot see, the green colours darkening towards the depths.

The world of Bjerger’s motifs is not unlike Munch’s – there are shorelines, there are fields, there are people in gardens, there are people in towns, there are portraits of faces and half-length portraits – but what they express is something very different. Whereas Munch charged all his pictures with himself – his own memories, his own moods and his own personal experiences – and did so in his own style with his own circle of motifs, so that we, if we are open to his pictures, can see what he saw and feel what he felt, Anna Bjerger uses photographs as the starting point for her paintings – not her own, but photos she finds at flea markets, in old magazines and weeklies, newspapers, books and user manuals. Her strategy is thus as far removed from Munch’s as it is possible to get, it might even make sense to say that it is the exact opposite. In Bjerger’s pictures the angle, the perspective, the motif and the framing have been chosen by someone else. Naturally, she invests something of herself in the choice of colours, style and the way the motif is reduced, but the personal, the deep-felt is already displaced through the difference between the person seeing and the person painting. The relation between the personal and the epochal becomes the theme of her paintings, that is what they explore and where they derive their force.

When I saw one of Bjerger’s paintings for the first time I knew nothing about this, but it was still present, there was a distance in the picture, something foreign which I was unable to locate but which still filled with me with a certain melancholy.

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