Erika Bergström
The Bærtling Scholarship 2017
Erika Bergström was born in 1986 in Stockholm, where she currently resides and works. She studied at Pernbys målarskola in Stockholm and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Konstfack in Stockholm in 2015.
Justification:
Erika Bergström has demonstrated an impressive willingness to explore painting beyond its limitations, much in the spirit of Olle Bærtling’s work when he described his artworks in terms of open form. Throughout his career, Bærtling sought to conceive of painting, sculpture, and architecture as parts of a larger, cohesive world (they are children of the same spirit, as he wrote). Erika Bergström aims to expand painting into a spatial dimension, where she sequentially and serially (like Bærtling) repeats certain forms while gradually shifting the content. The result is compositions that speak to the body as much as to the eye.