Nathalie Djurberg

Since 2001, Swedish-born artist Nathalie Djurberg (born 1978) has honed a distinctive style of video animation. Set to music and sound effects by her collaborator Hans Berg, Djurberg's handcrafted cinematic tales explore revenge, lust, submission, gluttony and other primal emotions through the conventionally innocent technique of “Claymation,” which in her hands becomes a medium for nightmarish yet wry allegories of human behavior and social taboo. Increasingly, Djurberg's practice has blurred the cinematic and the sculptural in environments that integrate moving images and related set pieces. This publication accompanies the artist's largest presentation in an American museum to date. The catalogue weaves documentation of her sculptures and stills from her recent films with texts (both original and found) that trace the historical, scientific and literary threads running through her practice.

Describing the work of the rising Berlin-based Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg, Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli write in their introduction to this substantial new volume, "Her videos are characterized by small, animated clay figures that she uses to create surreal atmospheres and often grotesque stories. The rudimentary but ingenious staging of these narrations is created by the artist herself. Sexual reminiscing, references to the macabre, violent and subtle pleasures of cruelty and the vaguely depraved give rise to an ambiguous sense of anxiety and unease." Featuring in-depth documentation of Djurberg's work, an essay by Germano Celant, an interview with the artists and a DVD of "The Prostitute," which was created expressly for this publication, this volume is the most substantial study yet of Djurberg's work.

Nathalie Djurberg was born in Lysekil, Sweden, in 1978 and she currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work was the subject of a recent one-person show at Vienna's esteemed Kunsthalle Wien.