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Svenska
Annika Bergvik-Forsander is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, collage, and textile embroidery. Embodiment, gender issues, and psychology are recurring themes she explores in her suggestive visual world. Her images often embed references to art history as well as a subtle touch of dark humor. At Galleria Joella, Bergvik-Forsander presents a series of new oil paintings and drawings from a project that began under the partly ironic working title “Finnish Pottery.”
The exhibited works are based on ideas of materiality and how we collect objects and assign them various values. The images play with fictional ceramic utility and decorative items, and the painted or drawn visualizations give these objects the nature of portraits. Conceptually, the project relates to both overconsumption and so-called “conspicuous consumption.” By purchasing a certain type of status object, the buyer hopes to elevate their personal status and perhaps gain a desired social position. The works in this series are consistently queer and feminist in nature, flirting with body parts and physical anomalies. Queerness is integrated into the depicted objects as unique creations—singular and self-willed alternatives to today’s normative status symbols.
Bergvik-Forsander has held around 40 solo exhibitions across Finland, including at Galleria G, Galleri Sinne, Art Hall Vasa, Poriginal Gallery, Porvoo Art Hall, and Titanik Gallery. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Finland and internationally, in cities such as Munich, Berlin, Riga, Salzburg, Umeå, and Stockholm. In addition to her degree in fine arts, she holds a Master’s degree in Art History from Uppsala University and is currently studying Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm. In 2021, Bergvik-Forsander was awarded the Marcus and Eva Collins Memorial Fund Painting Prize.
For more information, visit: https://bergvikforsander.com/
The exhibition is supported by Konstsamfundet, Svenska kulturfonden, and the Eugéne, Elisabeth and Birgit Nygren Foundation.