Birgir Andrésson: The Bear from Bern
The Bear from Bern is a presentation of works by Birgir Andrésson originally commissioned for the Department of Social Services in the Swiss capital of Bern.
Andrésson describes the works:
“I once got a job in Bern, working in a house for petty criminals and the unemployed. I worked with an architect who redesigned the house. Switzerland is a country of flags: all the cantons have a number of symbols and flags. In Bern, the bear is a symbol, but there are more symbols as well, and there’s a park in the city with bears—living ones. So, I got the women from the Icelandic Handknitting Association to knit flags for me with the Bern Bear: one had paws, another had a billy goat, and they were all knitted from undyed wool, in the colors of the sheep. They were placed on flagpoles that were bolted into the walls so that the flags stuck out a bit from the walls. The tips of the flagpoles were slices of cheese made of aluminum. They were triangles with holes like cheese. What connected us was the Swiss aluminum company Alusuisse out here in Hafnarfjörður (Iceland). This was a remake of the most famous Swiss cheese.
Then a group of women made cross-stitch pictures with these same symbols. I framed them in the same format as Icelandic stamps—specifically, the Hekla stamps. Where Mount Hekla would have been, I had this symbol or that, and instead of the stamp’s value, I put the number of the floor you were on in the house. And where it would have said “Iceland” on the stamp, I had a great big hunk of cheese with holes protruding from an opening as if the cheese had been shot. I made the cheese from a big, heavy block of wood that could be traced back to the sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson. The Sculptors’ Association had gotten their hands on all kinds of blocks of wood and rubbish that Sveinsson had left behind. He had intended to have these blocks under his works. I sawed them down and polished them up. When I introduced these flags to the committee, I said they were meant to bring some warmth into the building that was the Office of Social Affairs.”
Birgir Andrésson (1955–2007) lived and worked in Reykjavik, Iceland. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Reykjavik Art Museum in 2022. In addition to representing Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1995, the artist had many solo exhibitions, including at The National Gallery of Iceland (2006) and Stadtgalerie Bern, Switzerland (1997).
