Siri Bjerkecpainter and sculptress

Photo by John Harbo

Siri Bjerke and the creative poetry of colours

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(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