‘Anna Bjerger is concerned less with where her chosen images are found than that the ones she uses, transmutes into paintings, have some kind of electrical charge that inheres them, after a confirming delay, permanently to her memory bank.

A connoisseur of the lingering quality of images; of the aftertaste, if you like (she herself has compared her chosen scenes to pervasive scents), she consumes photographs, old and recent, personal and found, searching for captivating fault lines, inexplicable awkwardness and destabilizing emotional echoes, and monitoring the fade-rate of the psychic imprints they leave upon her. Analysing  Bjerger’s work purely in terms of its iconography – discussing it, in other words, as if it merely carried over the plaintive qualities of the snapshot – isn’t apt since her work is medium-specific. It’s about what the alchemical process of painting can do to our reception of an image that already had some kind of potential. It’s about how the haloing of paint’s slips, dribbles and generalized ambiguities can push it into another register.  ...so deftly does her work oscillate between raw materiality and figuration that one imagines what it would feel like to be made of the same stuff as the painting: to be that provisional and loosely outlined.

It’s only partly possible to explain why an image that’s not realistic in a photographic sense can be more alive than one that is, and why one that trails a dusty photographic spectre may feel realer still. We’re currently wired so that painting which does this, which comes across like a pale stranger in a bar who asks us to guess his or her life story and ends up telling us our own, feels true no matter what it depicts. And the only proof that Bjerger understands it any better than we do is that she’s able to do it over and again.’
(Extracted from text by Martin Herbert, 2003 for the Chapter Gallery publication)

Recent exhibitions have included her solo show Angels In Your Beer, a Chapter touring exhibition which premiered at Chapter Gallery, Cardiff and travels to Oriel Mwldan, Cardigan and then to the Pumphouse Gallery, London in August.