North-Information, # 231/Elisabeth Bergsøe 1971-94
Wtitten and traslated by Bent Petersen, 1994

“I struggle to achieve a goal that changes during the process of distillation right up until the point where the work is finished. What simplifies the result are all the demonstrations of the unsuccessful attempts to introduce new elements – unsuccessful because the attempts are not tight enough, create wrong compositions and do not function as a part of the whole. In this relation it is important that the result still involves as many elements as possible, which are visually different expressions of feelings. Fascination of – and play with – dimensions, colours and spaces.”

In the middle of the 70'ies Elisabeth Bergsøe felt she got stuck in her, until then, naturalistic painting. She needed to test new ways in order to go on.
“I felt that I began to repeating myself, that there was too much empty talk. I searched for a painting in which I in a more concentrated way could express my feelings and experiences. Abstraction was an obvious solution. While the idea of naturalistic painting is, by means of fields, lines, spaces, dimensions, light and colours, to express the perceived as close to the experienced reality as possible, the idea of the abstract, so-called constructive, painting, is by utilizing precisely the same means, to concentrate the impressions and in a synthesis to express as much as possible by using as few means as possible.”
Influenced to a certain extent by Hinduistic temples and Japanese mini sculptures, the so-called “Netsuke”, Elisabeth Bergsøe drew and modelled abstract architecture-like figures in which the experiences were stylized by means kept as simple as possible. The immediate inspiration could come from her own inner feelings or from impressions she received from the outside world: from nature, from the coloured decadence of the city-landscape or from the dream-like associations to the airy mass of the cumulus clouds. While in the beginning Elisabeth Bergsøe was most fascinated by the beauty of life and the world, she became in the first years of the 1980íes more preoccupied with the everyday world: the more simply and ordinary, the better. “Or, as my professor, Erling Frederiksen, told: It is life itself you should paint”. Good taste is fatal for any art. “My task is to depict an often chaotic, trite and ugly world in a simple and strong expression.”
Elisabeth Bergsøe's own feelings and emotions have, especially since the late 80'ies been an important source of inspiration, most obvious in a series of paintings from 1989-90, which reflect the mood of death, that affected her as a result of a series of death in the family. The strongest expression of this emotions occurs in a monochromatic black painting. The remaining paintings in the series are all in two sections whit black, death, as the one.
A black/gray-brown painting is further inspired by the balled of the murder of Ebbe Skammelsen. Of practical reasons – the farm had to be taken care of – the blood-feud took place in the autumn, and so the painting expresses the plough land rich in clay witch is the inevitable final place of rest for the dead.
A black/frost-blue painting expresses indirectly the feeling of death: The large empty space as a contrast to “lying in the earth being eaten by worms while the others are watching tv….”
A black/lemon-coloured painting expresses a violent aggressiveness. The garish yellow colour associates to warning–colours against poisonous or radioactive refuse, to the aggressive neon light and traffic lights of the big city. A cold night of raining…
“The more strict and simple you can express the experience, the more authenticity it will have”, she explains about the strictly simplified form of these painting. “In order to make the message as genuine as possible, it is necessary to make the colour precise and the form clear and expressive in the interaction between lines and fields.” For Elisabeth Bergsøe the work with the painting is therefore a steady struggle for clear it for noise, to put still more experiences and feelings into it without losing any of the strictness. A struggle to make the expression and the matter, the physical presence of the painting as an object of form and colour and the message she wants to tell, form a synthesis.
For Matisse art should function as a chair for rest and well-being, and so much constructive art imparts a meditative rest in its audience. But in Elisabeth Bergsøe's art there is no rest and well-being to get. On the contrary: here aggressiveness and terror of death are the dominating associations. “The painting are to promote the beholder’s own forbidden feelings: fear, despair end rage - get one to accept the negative without a happy ending. Art shouldn’t be therapy.”
On the work process itself she says that it is “cold and cynical work - transpiration rather than inspiration - to form a picture which is able to create strong feelings.” Latest Elisabeth Bergsøe has experimented to “put more well-defined colour-fields together in one picture resulting in enrichment in the combinations and a total which is certain as a conclusion”. Sometimes she uses trapezoid-shaped canvases in order to find a way of expression in which the statement could be more varied by not being pressed into a conventional form. The paint is carefully smeared on the canvas in thin, smooth coats without any brush-structure and romance of materials.
Elisabeth Bergsøe was born in 1953 in Copenhagen. She is educated as a painter and sculptor and studied with professor, Erling Frederiksen at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (1970-72) and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (1972-76 and 1977-78) with professor Svend Wiig Hansen as additional teacher. She made her début at Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in 1981 and has since then contributed to several group exhibitions. Member of “Corner” since 1993. Solo show at “Clausens Kunsthandel”, in Copenhagen in 1989.
Professor Palle Nielsen wrote in 1981 on Elisabeth Bergsøe's art works: “The obvious power of expression, which radiates from these pictures, makes it useless to emphasize pictorial qualities and at the same time their statements can hardly be explained in words. It must be due to the fact that these pictures seem to be filled up – they represent themselves as pictures, carried by the strongest necessity.” Professor Dan Sterup-Hansen wrote in 1982 on Elisabeth Bergsøe's drawings: “that they expressed an intensity of looking which is rare, on the same level as our greatest artists. Even compare to Jacquis Villon.”
Hellen Lassen wrote in 1988 in a review of an exhibition at Gallery Marius: “The forms are as simple as possible: six lines crossing each other or a white rectangle in a black one. But something happens in the confrontations, the lines are pointed so that their meeting point is almost invisible for which reason one feels as if the meeting takes place in another dimension. The paintings are very clean and in their stylisation they are a further adaption of the tradition from Malevitch and Mondrian through Op Art to the topical Danish and foreign concrete art.