Modern Art & Design Presents Christian Berg

During the 1930s and 1940s, Berg made several journeys to Greece, Egypt, and Italy, where encounters with ancient and archaic sculpture gave him a deep understanding of proportion, rhythm, and the expressive power of material. In the Mediterranean light, he saw how stone and bronze could embody both timelessness and motion. His travels in North Africa brought him close to the raw elements of nature – wind, light, and heat – influences later reflected in his organic formal language.

A clear example of this is his recurring torso motif, in which the human body is reduced to a rhythmic, almost spiritual volume. In these sculptures, the body is freed from anatomy, and Berg employs the inverted forms of post-Cubism to create contrast. A swelling chest or rounded thigh might be rendered as a hollow space, evoking an imagined volume. The torso thus becomes not a body, but an experience of human form – an abstraction moving between the victory goddesses of antiquity and the reductionism of modernism.

In 1954, Berg visited the seaside resort of Xylokastron on the Peloponnese in Greece for the first time. The pine forest, with its twisted trunks stretching down to the water’s edge, gives the village its distinctive character. Berg sketched in pencil and oil, resulting in a series of independent sculptures completed in 1956–57. In these works, the vitality of nature and the spirituality of humanity meet within a single material. Like the pine trees twisting toward the light, humankind seeks its own existential balance.

When Berg returned to Sweden, he brought these experiences with him and became a central figure in 20th-century Swedish sculpture. His works are characterized by light, clarity, and stillness, where the Nordic sensibility meets the universal.

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