Danelle Bergstrom: Afterglow

Danelle-Bergstrom-Afterglow-2006Featuring key works from the last 25 years of the artist’s practice, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery presents Afterglow – the first career survey of acclaimed Australian-Swedish painter Danelle Bergstrom.

Based in Hill End since 1997, Bergstrom now lives between Australia and Åland, a remote archipelago in Finland. Bergstrom uses landscape and portraiture as vessels to navigate “human emotion, experiences and choices” – where the artist paints what she feels, rather than what she sees.

Afterglow traces Bergstrom’s own life as it is reflected in the overtures and undertones of her subjects, from major landscape paintings and portraits to intimate sketches and drawings.

Featured artworks include Symphony, 2010; Between Two Worlds, 2020 – a painting celebrating Bergstrom’s two great loves, Hill End and Åland; and Entwined, 2020 – a suite of 12 paintings transformed into an immersive digital experience which invites the viewer to contemplate the beauty and fragility of the Australian bush.

Portraits of iconic national and international figures will also be on display, including Margaret Olley, Jack Thompson, Guy Warren, and the first female president of Finland, former President Tarja Halonen

For Bergstrom, painting is an intuitive process, allowing the psychological plain to inform the physical terrain of both place and face in her paintings. For the artist, ‘Nature’ moves beyond geographic location, title, and position, becoming the internal coordinates of transformative human experience.

“My landscape paintings are sensory memories – they are the way I understand the world and often a metaphor for human condition,” said Bergstrom.

Danelle Bergstrom has been awarded major prizes such as the Archibald Packing Room Prize (1995, 2007); the People’s Choice Award, Portia Geach Memorial Award (2013, 2010, 2009, 2006, 2005, and highly commended 2003); and the People’s Choice Award, Norvill Art Prize (2004, 2010).

Bergstrom has also been a multiple finalist with commendations in these and other prestigious awards including the Salon des Refusés and the Paddington Art Prize. She has painted over twenty public commissions and her works are held in significant public collections nationally and internationally.


Danelle Bergstrom: Afterglow
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 70 – 78 Keppel Street, Bathurst
Exhibition: 1 April – 11 June 2023
Free entry

For more information, visit: www.bathurstart.com.au for details.

Image: Danelle Bergstrom, Afterglow, 2006, oil on linen, 122 x 366cm. Courtesy the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney