Anna Berger (Moscow, 1991) is a painter/illustrator living and working in Tel Aviv. She studied illustration at British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow (University of Hertfordshire, UK) while working with various companies and magazines as a freelance illustrator. After graduating with DipHE in Illustration, she moved to Israel in 2013 and started to work mostly on personal projects in the new for her reality of self-expression and acceptance from local culture. Finally, her voice was valid and supported by Israeli audience which brought the narrative into her visuals. It was based directly on her background of restrictions and prohibitions in homeland.
Berger states: “I didn’t want to talk about sex, but I wanted to use erotics as a tool to communicate something more vulnerable. It indicates the measure of freedom that a person has acquired; it indicated intellectual control over his instinctive and emotional experiences. It’s archaic, primitive and straightforward. I wanted to talk about the subject most unclear, bizarre and untouchable; the subject I didn’t have a chance to observe in my childhood and understand logically as an adult – intimacy. The underestimated but so significant moments of something absolute. Since 2014 I started to observe intimacy everywhere – as inner desire, real experience, someone’s stories. I discovered it in the list of my favourite movies, painters, books – it’s a common narrative ever since, which is changing shapes, forms and directions.”
The artist capture these fragile carefully preserved as private property moments in dominant lines, all framed as if peeked after something restricted and unreachable. Her work can be placed in the wider field of art: from printed matter to murals, paintings, visual communication, etc.
