MONUMENTAL FIGURE, 1927

Christian Berg

Narrator: Christian Berg studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. A visit to the pyramids in Egypt made a deep impression on him, and in Paris he encountered cubism. Monumental Figure is an abstract female torso. It was exhibited at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, where it received harsh criticism. In the 1950s, the attitude to art had changed and Berg got consistently good reviews.

”My sculptural work is an expression of what touches and engages me, be it a strange flower or the shape of a tree, a rock or a broken shell on the beach, that I want to turn into poetry, or into a monumental figure, where the interrelated proportions seek to convey a sense of seriousness and religion.”