Anne Francien
van den Berg
Haarlem, The Netherlands 2002
Artist statement
Everything is a garden in a man-made world. Growing up on the border between marshy farmlands and city life around Amsterdam, I learned through early experiences with animal care and farm labour that our bodies are shaped by both cultural and natural environments. In the polder wetlands, ‘nature’ is built for productivity and extraction on a structured foundation. This continues to inform me and my practice. My recent series, ‘Poldergeist’, follows the spirit of the Dutch polder (wet)landscape, drained by the eternal presence of human traces.
When my grandmother grew a particularly resilient flower, she would bring part of the stem for my mother to plant in our garden, too. With soil as our witness, I imagine the landscape as built by generations of bodies, and the site of the body as a landscape in return. This cyclical interdependence sparked my interest in merging and subverting traditions of portrait painting and landscape techniques, or to even challenge what it means to paint. I paint with concrete that moves like sediment, hang things that feel too heavy. I return to mud, to soil, to mess because those are the things I know. I work with expanded painting and installation to explore how bodies are managed and framed.
I recognize myself, a lesbian woman and fashion model, in the experience of being reshaped and (re)produced as an image for consumption. That alienation guides me in the studio. The start of my paintings is a process of gestures, letting the paint drip intuitively, until a shape emerges as a body. An encounter follows when the blurry face of a subject appears. I see myself in my subjects, not in their image, but in their search for agency, to be present in the vulnerability of being seen. The muddy nature of my paintings is built up through liquid layers. Figures connect, submerge, and drip beyond the boundaries of the canvas. In doing so, they resist aesthetic entrapment. This is a response to my composition references I find in family archives, art history and philosophy, to social media phenomena, club culture and fashion photography. I want my work to resist being fully finished, suggesting an almost spectral in-between of real and imagined. This is what I consider queer landscape painting: rearranging existing orders to question who is allowed to feel at home in a structure built on Old Dutch traditions.
Everything is a garden in a man-made world. Growing up on the border between marshy farmlands and city life around Amsterdam, I learned through early experiences with animal care and farm labour that our bodies are shaped by both cultural and natural environments. In the polder wetlands, ‘nature’ is built for productivity and extraction on a structured foundation. This continues to inform me and my practice. My recent series, ‘Poldergeist’, follows the spirit of the Dutch polder (wet)landscape, drained by the eternal presence of human traces.
When my grandmother grew a particularly resilient flower, she would bring part of the stem for my mother to plant in our garden, too. With soil as our witness, I imagine the landscape as built by generations of bodies, and the site of the body as a landscape in return. This cyclical interdependence sparked my interest in merging and subverting traditions of portrait painting and landscape techniques, or to even challenge what it means to paint. I paint with concrete that moves like sediment, hang things that feel too heavy. I return to mud, to soil, to mess because those are the things I know. I work with expanded painting and installation to explore how bodies are managed and framed.
I recognize myself, a lesbian woman and fashion model, in the experience of being reshaped and (re)produced as an image for consumption. That alienation guides me in the studio. The start of my paintings is a process of gestures, letting the paint drip intuitively, until a shape emerges as a body. An encounter follows when the blurry face of a subject appears. I see myself in my subjects, not in their image, but in their search for agency, to be present in the vulnerability of being seen. The muddy nature of my paintings is built up through liquid layers. Figures connect, submerge, and drip beyond the boundaries of the canvas. In doing so, they resist aesthetic entrapment. This is a response to my composition references I find in family archives, art history and philosophy, to social media phenomena, club culture and fashion photography. I want my work to resist being fully finished, suggesting an almost spectral in-between of real and imagined. This is what I consider queer landscape painting: rearranging existing orders to question who is allowed to feel at home in a structure built on Old Dutch traditions.