5/6 2025—13/10 2025
Gallery 1 & 2
Curators: Theo Carnegy-Tan (Kunsthalle Praha), Pierre Wat (Fondation Hartung-Bergman)
In collaboration with Christelle Havranek (Chief Curator at Kunsthalle Praha) and Thomas Schlesser (Director of the Fondation Hartung-Bergman)
A major exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, And We’ll Never Be Parted, casts new light on the intertwined lives and work of Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung—two pivotal figures of European modernism whose romantic and artistic partnership left a quiet but profound legacy. Though Hartung’s name long outshone hers in the historical record, this new retrospective aims to rebalance the narrative, reintroducing Bergman as a pioneering force in abstract art, with a voice as elemental and singular as any of her contemporaries.
Born in Stockholm in 1909 and raised in Norway, Anna-Eva Bergman trained in Oslo, Vienna, and Paris, absorbing the languages of both Nordic mysticism and continental modernism. In Paris, she met the German-born Hans Hartung, five years her senior and already immersed in the experimental fervor of the interwar avant-garde. They married in 1929 and spent much of the following decade traveling and working between Germany, France, and the Balearic island of Menorca. But by 1937, Bergman walked away—from Hartung, from the marriage, and from the restrictive definitions of womanhood and creativity she felt closing in around her. In a letter to Hartung, included in the Prague exhibition, she wrote, “I must be completely free… to focus just on my own work.” It was a defining moment. While Hartung developed his dynamic, gestural abstraction—eventually becoming a titan of art informel and a Grand Prix winner at the Venice Biennale—Bergman quietly constructed a language of her own: minimal, meditative, and deeply inspired by the raw Northern landscapes of her childhood. Her canvases, often covered with gold, silver, and aluminum leaf, evoke fjords, mountains, and arctic light—not as realistic representations, but as symbolic, almost spiritual resonances. She transformed natural forms into visual archetypes, exploring the eternal and the cosmic through elemental abstraction. The war years separated the couple further. Hartung, a fierce opponent of Nazism, joined the French Foreign Legion, losing a leg in combat in 1944. Bergman returned to Norway and continued to refine her practice in solitude. Their paths crossed again unexpectedly in 1952 at an art opening in Paris—where, in what Hartung later called “love at first sight, again,” the two rekindled both romance and artistic companionship. They remarried in 1957 and settled in Antibes, building a shared villa with separate studios that allowed their artistic identities to coexist without fusing.
The Prague exhibition—co-curated by Theo Carnegy-Tan and Pierre Wat with support from the Hartung-Bergman Foundation—is the first to fully explore the couple’s artistic conversation. With more than 350 works, including paintings, sketches, archival photos, and personal correspondence, it creates a rich, multilayered portrait of two artists who evolved in parallel, not in each other’s shadows. Crucially, it positions Anna-Eva Bergman not just as Hartung’s partner, but as a visionary in her own right. Her rediscovery in recent years—through major retrospectives in Paris and Oslo—has revealed an artist whose clarity of form, use of materials, and spiritual restraint speak with startling freshness to contemporary sensibilities. “It wouldn’t have been right for this reunion to take place until they are treated as equals,” note the curators. And rightly so. The show presents Bergman and Hartung not as two halves of a whole, but as distinct voices in European abstraction—her elemental minimalism complementing his gestural dynamism in a silent, lifelong dialogue.
And We’ll Never Be Parted runs at Kunsthalle Praha from June 5 to October 13, 2025. It is more than a retrospective; it is a reclamation. And for Anna-Eva Bergman, it is long overdue.
Read more on Kunsthallepraha.org and Fondationhartungbergman
