Christian Berg was born into a humble home in Förslövsholm, in the northern part of Skåne. Because of his talent for drawing, he decided to pursue a career in art, and was eventually admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where he was mainly inspired by depictions of nature along the lines of Bruno Liljefors. During this time, his love of nature, and of the inner essence of life, became his main point of view and remained so throughout his artistic career. However, his expression would subsequently change, and go on to alter Swedish sculpture forever. His encounter with the Parisian movements in the 20s, and his visit to Egypt, become the defining impulses of what was a new chapter not only for Christian Berg’s own oeuvre, but also for the whole of the Swedish sculptural tradition.
It was during Berg’s (1893–1976) visit to the Peloponnese in 1954, that he discovered the pine tree. This tree, which has so many features in common with the Swedish pine, and yet seems so seductively southern thanks to its plumish crown and, particularly, its spicy scent, which comes forth in all its thick, heady sweetness when experienced in a warm sunset. However, none of these things captured the imagination of Berg the sculptor: what grabbed him was the trunks of the trees. Their winding, light-seeking, stubbornly searching arms. They are body and vegetation in one. A perfect sculpture to erect on a modern square, where there is no greenery. There are plenty of these in Sweden, where construction underwent an unparalleled modernisation at the time in question. Today, his sculptures are ranked among the finest of Swedish modernism, expressing as they do his own personal interpretation of cubism, abstraction, and simplification. Poetic and sincere, and always in touch with life, mankind, and nature.
The year after this bronze sculpture was made, Christian Berg, then aged 64, had a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. The critics hailed him as a Swedish pioneer of modernist abstraction. This was high praise indeed.
“My sculptural work is an expression of whatever grasps or engages me–it could be a peculiar flower, or the shape of a tree, a rock, or a seashell fragment on a beach that makes me want to turn it into poetry, or perhaps recast a figure in a monumental scale, exploiting the internal relations between its different proportions to attempt to produce something serious–religious, even.”