Ann Böttcher

Ann Böttcher (Sweden, born 1973) graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 2003. Wild nature and forests are at the center of her artistic investigations, even though she sometimes also explores darker aspects of human history. Her more prominent solo exhibitions include Ann Böttcher: Works 2000 – 2020 at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm (2 February – 28 March 2021) and Ann Böttcher – Works 2000 – 2021 at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (4 December 2021 – 27 February 2022).

Her work has rightfully received a lot of recognition, primarily for her meticulously executed pencil drawings. Her other techniques include collage, weaving, and installations. For many years, Böttcher has taken an interest in how identity is formed – culturally, nationally, and historically. Her works often point to the connections between the past and the present, between our common, shared history and our individual, personal one. Böttcher shows how facts, values, myths and memories combine to create a multi-dimensional image of what we believe nature represents. Her work also explores how human beings, consciously or unconsciously, construct the world around them by making it represent their own ideas and desires, and the way in which this image is continually changing.

To some extent rooted in previous generations romanticist rendering of Swedish nature, Böttcher also displays contemporary post-modern traits in her production. Her delicate drawings are sometimes paired with framed collages relating to the thought process behind the work. When Böttcher exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (Den Svenska serien [ett urval] 5 May – 25 September 2005) Camilla Carlberg (Curator of Learning Public Program, Moderna Museet) wrote the following:

One of the special features of Ann Böttcher […] is that she mixes her own art with that of others. Her drawings are a part, parallel to parts from other visual artists, writers, poets, illustrators. One is not worth more than the other, but together they create a story. She brings Swedish cultural heritage to the fore and makes it a contemporary concern. In her presentation, every detail is carefully balanced, every paper chosen with care, every pencil line in the right place. And at the same time, she allows herself to underline with a coloured pen, make notes in the margins and put post-it notes next to particularly interesting documents. Here the everyday is in the same place as the aesthetically perfect. That's what history looks like, I guess.

In scholarly, and methodical, fashion Ann Böttcher explores the iconography of nature from a wealth of different perspectives. Her studies of the fir or spruce tree, for example, as a symbol of the establishment of territorial claims or national identities – encompassing everything from extreme nationalism to the very image of isolated sadness and gloom – can be seen as an exploration of Swedish, as well as international, identity in relation to the history of the fir tree.

Her delicate and sensitive pencil drawings, relating her to the earlier Romanticists, belongs to a tradition that stretches, via Swedish predecessors such as Marcus Larsson (1825 – 1864) and Karl XV (1826 – 1872) back to international masters like Jacob van Ruisdael (The Netherlands, 1629 – 1682, “the father of landscape painting”). Whereas Marcus Larsson highlights drama and plays on exuberant emotions, Böttcher’s production, however, seems to be characterized by a cold analytical process, which often highlights, and questions, nationalist chauvinism as it has been expressed, in some ways, for example in the landscape paintings of Karl XV.

One can also make connections to other earlier artists such as Caspar David Friedrich (Germany, 1774 – 1840), whose Fir Trees in the Snow (1828, oil on canvas, 31 x 25 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany) epitomizes Romanticism in landscape painting, during the 19th century, Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) and Swedish landscape painter Carl Fredrik Hill (1849 – 1911) who depicted firs and spruces in several hundreds of drawings between 1883 and 1911. Böttcher has referred to both Dürer and Hill in her own production.

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