Biography
Caspar Berger (Utrecht, 1965) has been active as a visual artist since 1992. He lives and works in Amsterdam. Berger studied Plastic and Spatial Forms at the AKI Academy for Visual Art in Enschede (1984-1990) under Maja van Hall, Ad Gerritsen, Albert van der Weide, Helen Frik, Emo Verkerk and Hans Ebeling Koning. At the time, the course focused not so much on sculpture as on construction. Like many of his contemporaries, Berger concentrated on mixed media work: abstract constructions and video installations. He continued to explore this field at the Jan van Eyck Academie, a post-academic institute in Maastricht (1990-1992).
Berger was inspired by the work of video artists such as Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman and Nam Jun Paik, but in his own work he chose to use a combination of video and physical objects. Like Marc Quinn, Berger employed the strategies of traditional sculpture, which he critically investigates and deconstructs in his oeuvre. This postmodern exploration, so typical of the 1990s, led him to produce installations which became more complex and larger in scale with each work.
Due to the physical and logistical boundaries Berger encountered during this period, he decided on a change of tack. His love of the Italian High Renaissance finally led him to choose the medium of sculpture. Berger thus associated himself with the 1980s revival of figurative art, a movement of which his former lecturer Ad Gerritsen was at the forefront. Gerritsen’s interest in physiognomy led to an exploration of the tension between the external and internal: all depends on representation and presentation; the body is merely a façade that conceals emotion. This is something Berger is intensely aware of, and in his work he investigates the relationship between the interior and exterior, between reality and image.
Berger began with a series of statues of his family, which were exhibited in De Waag Centre for Visual Art in Leiden. Although Family (1999) and Group (2000) are apparently personal works, the individuals are expressly presented as an anonymous group. Berger makes use of the associations of a tribunal or other authoritative body evoked by a group of individuals positioned in a row. However, at the same time he adds a new dimension, in that it is his family and friends who are “elevated” to this role. Because Berger deliberately leaves the surface of the statues unfinished, they also trigger associations with decay.
Although at first Berger specifically chose to work exclusively in wax, in 2004 he decided retrospectively to cast his statues in bronze. In doing so he did not disguise the casting process, but took advantage of the value the work gains when this process is left apparent: “I make a cast, a copy of myself, but during the process the statue acquires a will of its own and a transformation takes place.” By leaving the flashing and sprues (seams and pouring channels) visible, Berger implicitly emphasises both the fact that the work has been cast in one piece and not welded together from separately cast components, and that it is an individual work of art.
Berger’s postmodern interpretation of existing motifs is also apparent in the series of self-portraits that has been his focus since 2001. This was instigated by an encounter with the self-portrait by Johan Gregor van der Schardt (1530-1581) in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, initiated by curator Frits Scholten. The work is one of the earliest autonomous self-portraits by a sculptor.
In his self-portrait series, Berger not only explores the phenomenon of the autonomous self-portrait, with its technical and physical obstacles, but also subjects his own person to self-examination. In doing so he literally turns himself inwards.
In Self-portrait I (2001) Berger demonstrates his aversion to the glorification that characterises traditional sculpture. Closed eyes – a feature inextricably linked with the silicone moulding technique he employs – are suggestive of self-examination and introspection. This metaphor culminated in Self-portrait V/Imago (2007), in which the sculptor’s face is turned inwards both literally and metaphorically.
This “inversion” is also the key feature of Berger’s contemporary interpretation of Michelangelo's Pietà. Berger’s Pietà (2006) is a negative impression remodelled into a positive representation, in which Mary’s grief at her son’s untimely death is, as it were, turned outwards. In contrast to the absolute perfection of Michelangelo’s Pietà, Berger’s version is raw. Not only because of the inversion, but also due to the way he gives new meaning to Christian iconography, Berger shows himself as a postmodernist: he uses the original statue as a point of departure for the realisation of his own ideas.
In an earlier work, Innocenzo (2004/2007), Berger makes this apparent, using minimal means to evoke the figure of the pope: the statue refers directly to work by the painters Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992). With the jaw and legs left away, this physically large statue falters in its external grandeur.
Berger’s fascination for mutilation, evident in this statue, can also be seen in Self-portrait II (2004) and Self-portrait III (2005), and the previously mentioned work Family (1999/2007). In 2008 he added a new dimension to this fascination in Torso ZZM, commissioned by the Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen. The work is grafted onto the Belvedere Torso, the famous statue in the Vatican collection which inspired Michelangelo as well as countless other artists.