Oli Berg
Oli Berg’s work has nature and landscape as its fundamental reference. This vindication of the natural environment has a character, in Berg’s work, that we could call festive, given the use of color that we can see in his work. His monochrome sculptures of pure colors and paintings that combine bright shapes and tones bring us closer to pop and the celebration of an intimate nature that is, at the same time, a tribute to exuberance and natural power. It is a personal landscape, where the elements that make up his world are united as a whole: flowers, trees, mountains, rivers, seas … and which are presented in this exhibition as a metaphor for the diversity of human beings.
The picturesque is an idea typical of the nineteenth century and close to the presuppositions of romantic painting, and refers, as the art historian Valeriano Bozal reminds us, to the empirical and everyday reality, to the observation of everything that is close to us. , placing the pleasure and beauty in the most common reality that surrounds us, such as the landscape. The landscape could be, from the romantic perspective, or overwhelming, terrible and sublime, or warm, luminous and beautiful, according to the terminology that the philosopher Edmund Burke would use in his treatise on the beautiful and the sublime. The nature to which Oli Berg refers in his work is rather the second: that bright, close, luminous, colorful nature … But perhaps in this excess of color we will find something disturbing: the Freudian unheimlich appears in the disproportion of the plants and the flowers represented, in the excess of color, in the artificiality of their forms … and what could be a happy and picturesque landscape could be the scene of a story by the Brothers Grimm.
The installation arrangement of the works recreates a large-scale garden of plants, in which visitors enter as if it were an alternative world or a fairy tale, where we feel small next to the large size of the vegetal forms of our around. The author herself affirms: “it is a way of feeling and appreciating beauty, poetry, the deep and spiritual meaning that we all have … It is a way of life in short.”
The materials that shape the works are acrylic on canvas and sculptures made of steel, aluminum, ceramics … The shiny surfaces emphasize this personal character of the garden that Oli Berg presents.
Oli Berg works and lives in Barcelona. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Ukraine, she completed her master’s degree in Spain. The latest works of the artist have been presented at the International Biennial of Art in Florence, Italy (2017), BACOS International Art Biennial, Spain (2016), numerous exhibitions in Barcelona, New York and South Korea.
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