Tusen år i Småland, V (Ydre härad) (Thousand Years in Småland, V [Ydre hundred])

This work was acquired at Galerie Nordenhake during Market Art Fair in Stockholm, 2024. Prior to the fair, Nordenhake wrote the following on their website:

Scientifically and methodically, Ann Böttcher examines the visual world of nature from a variety of perspectives. For example, she examines the fir tree as a symbol of the formation of territorial claims or national identities – everything from extreme nationalism to the image of obstinacy and heavy- mindedness. Her delicate and understated pencil drawings are meticulously executed and refer to a nature-romantic aesthetic and botanical visual world. Böttcher shows how facts, myths, memories and values create an ambiguous picture of what we consider nature to stand for. How man consciously or unconsciously constructs his own environment when it is allowed to represent our ideas and desires and that this image is constantly changing.

What isn’t constantly changing, however, is the basic conditions of humanity. Since we first came down from the trees, we have been looking at them and seeing ourselves, seeing lush metaphors for our own deepest, existential concerns. Trees have been of special enchantment and self- clarification, not least to artists. The visionary English poet and painter William Blake (1757 – 1827) wrote (in a letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799): “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way / As a man is, so he sees”.

On the European continent, William Blake’s contemporary, Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774 – 1840) 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. That the fir, or spruce, seems to be of a certain significance for Central European artists is attested by, the Swiss-born, German modernist painter Paul Klee (1879 – 1940), who, in a 1924 lecture about the creative process (later adapted into the now-iconic essay “On Modern Art”, posthumously published in 1948 with a foreword by the legendary English art historian, philosopher, poet and anarchist Sir Herbert Read [1893 – 1968]), likened the artist to a tree:

This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree. From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work.

Some fifty years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Canadian-born painter Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004), whose sparse and serene paintings radiate a largehearted devotion to what is best and purest in the human spirit, gave the following background to her meticulously gridded lines: “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees”.

A list of international artists, from the Middle Ages to the present day, who have been inspired by trees in general or fir trees more specifically could be endless. Böttcher is a recent addition whose work in the field has brought her fame and recognition. Born in Bruzaholm, deep in the densely forested parts of the county of Småland, she is aware of the mesmerizing beauty that can be found in the fir trees.

The title of the work, Thousand Years in Småland, V (Ydre hundred), appears cryptic and mysterious. What could be said, however, is that Ydre härad was a so-called “hundred” (an administrative district) in the county of Östergötland. The district corresponds to the current Ydre municipality (named after the district). The area historically measured 781 square kilometers, with a population (in 1920) of 7,464 people, and covered an area between Lake Sommen and the border with northern Småland. Ydre is recorded, as far back as, in 1279 and the name probably derives from the old Swedish word “ydher”, which means “yew”. The name would then mean “the area where yew grows”, which makes perfect sense when you look at Böttcher’s drawing.

Provenance
Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm.
Firestorm Foundation.

Exhibitions
Liljevalchs konsthall (Liljevalchs Public Art Gallery), Stockholm, Market Art Fair, 17 – 19 May 2024.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation