Siri Berg By William Zimmer (1994)
Siri Berg, Untitled (Five Panel Collage), Collage from Japanese woodblock prints, 36 x 72 in (91.4 x 182.8 cm)
The art of Siri Berg is an art of nuance. This observation might seem surprising after an initial look at her paintings and collages because she operates out of a venerable and, in theory at least, uncompromising framework: geometric abstraction. Repetition governs almost every works she makes (with some bracing exceptions).
Nuance and geometric rigor isn't the only marriage of disparate qualities she effects. Her work also springs from an unusual pairing of both the mysticism of the Kaballah and her Swedish background with its aspects of trimness and serenity. Such a liberalness of sources and potential meanings is, historically, not inconsistent with geometry's formal constraints. Berg can trace her aesthetic back to the Bauhaus, an institution that harbored the widest range of sources and ideas.
Berg was born in Sweden. Her family came to New York in the 1940s. The Swedish aesthetic in the twentieth century is one of elegance and practical simplicity. There is a trace of the great tradition of Kaballah that governs her thinking; creation, we are reminded, at every level involves the twining of opposites. In Berg's oeuvre, this is constantly expressed by intense colors seguing into rare earth tones, and rough textures giving way to flatness in the same painting.
Her paintings and collages are distinguished by the play of light. At times the light is intense, but it is just as often muted, translucent of veiled. The ambience of her homeland plays a large part in this. In winter, light in Sweden is whispered and fleeting, but in summers when the sun stays long in the sky people revel in the light.
The ingrained empirical fact of light and life resides most strongly in her collages composed of handmade paper from Japanese method woodblock prints. These are delicate papers with discreet patterning and they bear traces of the raw materials from which they arc made. Berg subtly prints these papers in muted atmospheric "earth" colors close in value to the primaries.
The special significance of each of the various times of day, here embodied in the treatment of light, is central to Kaballistic thought. The major theme of the Kaballah is Creation: Creation is both bound up in the passing of time and is time being held for eternity reflected in the timeless aspect of Berg's realm, the plastic arts. Berg's absorption with the theme brings to mind Monet's haystacks and cathedrals, as well as work of a more minimal stripe such as Barnett Newman.
Serial presentation is a mode employed frequently by Berg although any component of a piece can stand on its own. Lately she has pared down her geometric schemes to the intersections of vertical and horizontal lines with areas thereby formed comprising the grid are rectangles of unequal size. This variance underscores the mutableness and play of creation. A group title for this latest work is "Bars" and Berg savors the similarity of this scheme to the patterns on computer screens when they're at rest.
At this writing, Berg is proceeding to make these grids in intense, opaque colors, a textural shift from the translucency which has governed much of her recent work. The viewer learns to appreciate these "jolts"- surprises in the midst of regularity - as hallmarks of Berg's thought. One might think how the unexpected occurs in the serial photographic experimentation of Eadweard Muybridge.
A shift in texture within a single painting is an effect Berg has long perfected in many large works, color and pattern are retained but a flat mode of painting yields to a highly tactile one. The painterly part works as a kind of veil across the flat area, Compositions in which these textural shifts occur are not often complete patterns but partial ones which seem to have been zoomed in on as in camera close-ups. The group title for such work is "Endless", and presentation of the ineffable can be only a slice of the whole.
The nuanced art of Siri Berg is an art of great complexity but its essential fidelity is to the inexorable rhythms of life is proclaimed by its constant forthrightness and clarity.
—William Zimmer
October 1994
New York City
*This essay was published on the occasion of the exhibition “Siri Berg: Painting and Collages,” Walter Wickiser Gallery, New York, January 28-February 16, 1995. William Zimmer is a contributing critic to The New York Times.