Finnmark, Winter

The Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman (1909–1987) spent most of her life in France but Norway played an important role in her art. Her art underwent a transformation in the early 1950s, and became more abstract. Particularly fascinated by the Norwegian landscapes, nature and arctic light, she developed a form of abstracted landscapes and scenery based on her travels in North of Norway. She is one of Norway’s modernist artists of the 1950’s and cultivated a formal idiom that focused on a handful of archetypal abstracted motifs within themes such as rocks, celestial bodies, mountains, fjords, horizons, boats and steles. The painting N°2-1966 Finnmark Hiver, PVA and metal foil on canvas, 150 x 300 cm is an abstracted image of the arctic landscape from the most northern part of Norway close to the Russian border. Horizontally the image presents dark and light parts that show the contrasting rendering of a landscape in the dark winter season of northern Norway. Bergman developed her painting technique by applying layers of metal foils and PVA on the canvas. In the lower part, reflecting silver foils depict the snow together with darker grey and yellow grassy parts of color. The silver both reflects and alludes inner light and enforces the shadow effects. Fragments of reindeer lichen emerges through the snow as darker grey spots and lets the reindeer grass its only nourishment. The relationship between the light landscape and the pitch black is creating a perspectival effect offering the viewer to gaze above and beyond the alpine tundra of Finnmarksvidda.