From press release:
From the small and wonderful everyday objects to life’s grandest emotions: A new collaborative exhibition between lifelong friends and artists Chantal Joffe and Anna Bjerger opens at Gammel Strand in Copenhagen on 21st June 2024.
One lives in the heart of London, the other in the middle of the Swedish forests. In the exhibition The Time Before, the longtime friends and colleagues Chantal Joffe and Anna Bjerger revisit the shared interests that initially brought them together: literature, poetry, family, and emotions, in a series of new paintings in both large and small scale.
After meeting in Rome in 1999, Joffe and Bjerger developed a close and experimental professional partnership. Together, they have created the exhibition The Time Before for Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, where they grapple with the time that has passed. The exhibition features around 50 paintings installed on the top floor of Gammel Strand.
A SHARED PLACE IN LIFE
As recent graduates from art school, Anna Bjerger and Chantal Joffe shared the same studio building. Here, they developed their individual artistic practices, centered around the endless doings of everyday life: setting the table, potted plants, fashion, and more – in detailed and intimate scenes that characterize the universes of both artists. In 2004, Anna left London for Sweden. Working in two very different environments for the past 20 years without the opportunity to engage with each other’s practice, it is affirming to see how the paintings share concerns, albeit through different expressions.
Shaped by the 1990’s art scene the work of Joffe and Bjerger vibrate with an underlying and nonchalant coolness, contrasting the tenderness with which the individual motifs are chosen. In The Time Before, the two artists make their work and themes intermingle as everyday objects become vessels for love and lingering disaster, where companionship merges with loneliness and intimacy connects with being exposed.
Bjerger works with a sensitive documentary style, while Joffe focuses on portraiture and how human relations materialize in a glance or a posture. The two artists share a profound interest in photography. Joffe has for years been fascinated by the photographic portraits of artist Diane Arbus, while Bjerger previously has worked with found photographs and used them as a basis for her paintings. For this show she has worked with images from her own surroundings and life, which is a new way for her to work.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF LIFE AND SMALL SENSATIONS
The exhibition’s title references the short story Winter in the Abruzzi from 1944 by the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg. Written in the last year of World War II, the story deals with everyday life, friendship, memory, and grief.
This essay painfully reminds us of the passage of time and where to place importance in life. Drawing on these themes, Joffe and Bjerger explore life experiences, bodies, relationships, and storytelling in their work. In a blend of
joy and melancholy, they both transform the complexities and subtle sensations of life into delicate yet straightforward paintings that meet the viewer at eye level and the heart.
Nanna Hjortenberg, director at Gammel Strand, says:
This summer the programme at Gammel Strand focuses on figurative painting, as we present two exhibitions of colors and figurative narratives. Figuration in art history has a long and weighty tradition which is currently undergoing radical scrutiny in terms of themes, authorship and representation. Across two exhibitions we present three artists who each renew figuration in their own way: In Chantal Joffe and Anna Bjerger’s works, the day to day and the existential connects as life phases are reflected in everyday situations. In Christina Quarles’ works, questions of identity, body, and sexuality are rethought. Common to both exhibitions is their deep connection to the questions we all share: Who am I? And am I using my life in the right way?
Chantal Joffe explains:
During the pandemic, I thought a lot about Ginzburg’s short story ”Winter in the Abruzzi”. Back then, I understood it as always imagining that better times lie ahead, but actually, it is often the life one is living that is the good time – the time before. But when I reread it, I realized that I had misunderstood it, and that the book actually involves a loss of innocence.
Anna Bjerger elaborates:
”Winter in the Abruzzi” describes a situation I can personally relate to: The idea of longing for a place that you idealize. A place that has everything your current situation cannot provide. The loss of innocence that Chantal mentions inevitably comes at a certain point in life, and it is something we explore in the exhibition.
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