Art Statement
“From the beginning of my career, I have been interested in and raised issues related to anthropology and psychology. Especially around the human and its relation to her personal and social environment – an interest greatly influenced by my personal experience as a political refugee in Sweden.
As an experimental artist in recent years, I have worked mainly with graphics and mixed media in a combination of classic and modern techniques - with mixtures of colours, watercolour paintings, three-dimensional objects, drawings and other art forms primarily on paper. What is so fascinating in the printmaking work is that it is dictated by using both the conceptual intelligence and the tactile intelligence, in the same way as the body is needed to produce artistic work.
My visual vocabulary is based on expressions of strong colours with a large variation and precision in the registration of lines and brushwork that come together in powerful and emotional aesthetic manifestations.
At certain times has my graphical work been dedicated to deeply explore the harmony, softness and body fragility that frame our physical and mental health.
I have focused among other conceptual strategies in creativity and art as a method of establishing and restoring the essential connection with ourselves and with others, and thereby also the transformative power of art. I advocate constantly the importance of ethical and aesthetic use of creativity for social wellbeing.
Learning the method Maniére noir has opened new angles to drawing, it has really aroused my interest in developing this way of looking at the object. The results are remarkable and illusory; it is magical to retrieve the light from the black stone surface. Maniére noir is my complement to the other more common techniques of lithography.”
Berta Guerra Aredal is one of the most prominent stone printmaker artist in Sweden today. For the broad range of stone-lithographic methods she uses, her technical expertise and artistic expression she has been honoured with several fellowships and international residences including; Grafikwerkstatt Dresden, Germany and La Ceiba Gráfica, Xalapa, México. She received her higher education in Chile and Sweden.
In February 2014 Berta Guerra Aredal made her first individual exhibition in her origin country Chile in the Gallery La Sebastiana of the estimated Cultural Centre of Pablo Neruda Foundation in Valparaíso, Chile. One of her lithography “Pre-Hispanic Intercultural Couple” produced in her artistic residence at La Ceiba Gráfica, Xalapa, gave rise to this new solo exhibition which shows now 2016 in the same Gallery, this time related to the epic work Canto General of the Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda.
2015 she graduated in the study program of Interdisciplinary Printmaking at the Academy of Art Eugeniusz Geppert in Wroclaw, Poland deepening her research in lithographic method Scratch in reverse, in order to achive a gray scale like Mezzotint . A project that allowed her to create all the new works that form part of the exhibition “Men” (Los Hombres) February – March 2016, in La Sebastiana, Valparaíso.
March 2016