Photo by John Harbo
Siri Bjerke and the creative poetry of colours
(Fragment from the catalogue for the exhibtion G2, Hamburg)
The passion of the brush’s stroke, colour surging up, a figure resting, then freeing itself, surface still untouched, then coming into movement, composition as confrontation, as liberation of creative tension – with Siri Bjerke’s paintings we are meeting a primary happening.
The word poetry derives from the Greek word poiesis and bears the notion of primary creation in it. Siri Bjerke creates a world with the brush, leads figuration and abstraction into a clash, ignites spheres of intensity which are difficult to escape from.
The leading momentum in this process corresponds to something Siri Bjerke has called the self-will of stones when talking about her sculptures of granite, marble and lime stone: her stone horses, stone elks and fairy bridges. In relation to her paintings we can likewise talk about the self-will of colours.
But while Siri Bjerke’s stone sculptures, smoothly tamed in their primeval force, wait to be ridden towards a silent world of their own or to be stepped on, a bridge into the unknown, the colours of her paintings seem to dance. They grasp the viewer passionately, enveil him, intoxicate him, sweep him away with them – whereto?!
- Annette Vonberg