Genesis 2:7: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The artistic work of Lili Berger originates deeply in the soil, you could imagine the place where the shore slowly transforms into the sea, and the sea becomes the shore. „The Clay“, „the Sea“, are two constant fascinations which continuously wriggle throughout her oeuvre, both having the essential, primordial meaning for humankind.„The Clay“, one of the most ancient and the most pliable materials on which the separation between human and God, the encounter of man and himself alone, and finally, the separation of man from himself, has been demonstrated several times and still is going on. First, there was God's hand, when he created man from clay, according to various mythologies and religions. Next was the man's hand, when in the Neolithic period „a man formed the pottery of the dust of the ground.“ That marked the beginnings of the domestic life and civilization, the space around man started to be „man-made.“ Finally, with the beginning of industrialization there was „a machine's hand“ which marked the disappearance of craftsmanship, and the separation of the human from himself. The world became „ready made.“Following the path of the mentioned periods by which we can perceive the clay in our civilization, Berger's oeuvre encompasses similar content. Some works, mainly ceramic sculptures, resemble primordial forms like nutshells, conch shells and different basic forms. Then, in the same manner as the prehistoric man, Berger imitates some of these essential forms and makes vessels and vases, sometimes also playing with language, using the letter as a motif, deconstructing its content and form. At last, there are the mixed media installations or ready made installations, which, as in some cases of Arte Povera contemporary art movement, bring together both traces of nature and industry, like, for instance, in C'est le tour qui fait la musique (2012) where wood, rubber, ceramic, metal and bike wheel meet..., quoting also the famous Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1916-1917).It is not that Berger only imitates the mentioned primordial forms, but just like nature or just like industry itself she also repeats different elements in her creation. In many cases, one sculpture or installation will consist of many different uncountable conch shells, often hanging on the sisal rope (sometimes even a recycled element appears, since she uses ropes found on the sea shore) and/or being attached to reinforcement mesh (Whispers, 2012). She plays with the „repetitiveness“ not only on the level of the form, but also on the linguistic level, when, for example, the title literally resembles the sculpture itself, questioning the „meaning“ itself, for example, in the installation A rose is a rose is a...(2016). The play with words not only does exist in Berger's titles of the works, but is also present, as already mentioned, in her vessels work, and lately even in her sculptures and installations, where porcelain letters are sometimes exhibited in jars or are dispersed on the floor, again resembling the seeds or fragments of shells. In the joint, collaborative work The art is not present (Annabelle Schatteman, Chris de Vis, Anke van den Berg, Lili Berger, 2015), the neon letters, in Mario Merz style, in an ironic way demonstrate sometimes the delusionist side of (conceptual) art and its meaning.
The work and artistic personality of Lili Berger would fit in well with the text of the preface to Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art (the volume featuring 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists, Phaidon, 2017). Writing about the „boom of clay“ in the contemporary art world, the curator Clare Lilley also notes that contemporary artists working with clay „have collapsed the distinctions between craftsperson, maker, sculptor, artist.“ This is a very thought-provoking observation which can also be applied to Berger's artistic approach, and which lucidly saves this kind of art from the adjectives like „decorative“ or „souvenir like“, and brings it closer to experimenting with the boundaries of craftsmanship and art, and in some cases, even crossing them. Since, what could ceramics bring but the constant wonder of always a different and unexpected offspring.
Neva Lukić (curator) - July 2018