ELIZABETH BERGELAND
Location:
Philadelphia, PA, USA
ARTIST BIO
Elizabeth Bergeland (b. 1983) grew up in Wyoming and Colorado before earning her BFA in Painting and Anthropology from the University of Colorado in 2006. She now lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Bergeland’s work merges figurative realism with surreal or imagined spaces. Always rich in symbolism, her more recent work leans deeply personal, reflecting themes of connection, doubt, and the passage of time.
Her paintings have been exhibited nationally, with her first solo show in 2022. Her work has been featured in Create Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, Friend of the Artist, 1st Look TV, Root Quarterly, The Visionary Projects, and more. She is also the illustrator of Being Edie is Hard Today (2019) and The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection (2021), the latter earning a Kirkus Star, an NPR review, and a spot on Smithsonian Magazine’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2021.”
She lives with her husband and three children.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Animated by my first adult friend-breakup, my most recent body of work explores the loneliness and self-doubt that followed. The anchor piece in the series, an 18 foot triptych, unfolded one panel at a time—narrating the unsettling fear that I might just be completely ill-equipped for modern life. I abandoned my usual, meticulous planning and painted before thinking—testing what happens when I let intuition lead.
These works wrestle with the impossible pace of productivity, pressure to be constantly connected, and the ache of wanting everything to slow down. Is being disconnected the greatest luxury? I question whether fear sits at the center of art-making: fear of failure, success, time slipping by, and never making anything that truly matters.
I crave solitude, then I resent it. I make something and love it, only to remember it’s not really important. But then, in the act of making, I remember: it is.
