Bigert & Bergström (Mats Bigert, Lars Bergström)

The artist duo Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström are constantly on the move with their work, which is based on the climate crisis and the research on it. In their popular exhibition 'The Drought', salt is the starting point. The exhibition is based on two different trips, to the ancient salt reservoir Margherita di Savoia in Italy and to a seawater desalination plant outside Barcelona, Spain. The exhibition 'The Drought' included the auction's work 'Reverse Osmosis Plant'. The work contains images of the Spanish desalination plant mounted on an imaginary molecule and is a typical Bigert & Bergström work.

Axel Andersson writes for konsten.net in November 2013;
"A project about salt and water, The Drought, forms the second part of the artist duo Bigert & Bergström's eschatological odyssey that began last year with The Storm. The three remaining parts have equally fitting epic titles: The Freeze, The Flood and The Light.
In concrete terms, Bigert & Bergström's work is characterized by a disarming literality. Photographs of salt, sea and factories have been mounted in crystals, molecules and as flat dioramas where photos, meteorological signs and spherical molecules are depicted on three layers of glass. The imagery's references span an exciting field from the sublime nature of Romanticism to an exterior documentation of factories in the spirit of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and factory interiors that recall, in a curiously reversed order, the architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers Centre Pompidou in Paris. All this forms a world deceptively free from man."
In connection with the exhibition at Varbergs konsthall in 2014, Martin Erlandsson writes in Hallands Nyheter;
"For over 20 years, Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström have been interested in how modern technology can affect the earth and its climate, and the ideas that exist about being able to create new utopian worlds when our own living environment collapses - for example on the planet Mars.
- The theme of doom is in the background, in this project through the drought, but we are not artists who romanticize disaster, says Lars Bergström.
In salt as a spice, a symbol of thirst and contamination of fresh water, they have found a contradiction to depict. Through photographs that provide a 360-degree view in globes mounted like a molecule, an energy-hungry desalination plant in Barcelona is shown, while the images of sea salt production in Italy are shown in the form of crystals."