Norwegian artist Bernhard Bratsberg (b. 2000) turned to painting as a way of reconfiguring his relationship to the body, following a career-defining injury and a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. What began as a loss of physical certainty, developed into a sustained inquiry into the tension between bodily limitation and intention. His work explores how attention, memory, and sensation extend beyond the body’s immediate location, negotiating tensions between control and instability, presence and absence, authorship and surrender.
Bratsberg constructs compositions through the repeated rotation of the canvas. This process of spinning functions as a method of erasure; while erasure itself is a form of collage. Drawing from his immediate surroundings - notably, the industrial area of Årsta Partihallar, in which his studio is situated - these influences are layered into the work with each turn of the canvas. Before reaching their final form, the paintings pass through multiple distinct orientations, each contributing a visible or residual trace to the completed surface. This process allows for the works to resist singular readings and emphasizes them as physical, temporal objects. Figuration is drawn from bodily memory, art history, and revisionary processes of erasure and overlap. Recent works further emphasise the connection between the artist’s body and the artwork through hand-applied marks that document the choreography of making and register sensation directly onto the surface. Across Bratsberg’s practice, painting becomes a vessel for articulating what resists language: embodied knowledge, subliminal feeling, and the quiet intensity of lived experience.