Nathalie Djurberg

Nathalie Djurberg (full name Arielle Eva Nathalie Djurberg) was born on 2 January 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden. She studied at Folkuniversitetet in Gothenburg from 1994 to 1995, then at Hovedskous Art School in Gothenburg from 1995 to 1997, before earning an MFA from Malmo Art Academy in 2002. She is best known for stop-motion animations built from clay and Plasticine figures, often depicting violent, sexual, or psychologically charged scenarios that probe cruelty, control, and social taboo, paired since 2004 with soundtracks and sculptural staging by composer Hans Berg, with whom she now exhibits as the duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg.

Her institutional profile grew quickly through the 2000s, with solo presentations at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005), Kunsthalle Wien (2007), the Hammer Museum, Fondazione Prada, and Sammlung Goetz (2008), and the Centre Pompidou (2009). In 2009 she won the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist at the 53rd Venice Biennale for The Experiment. She went on to receive the Cairo Biennale Prize in 2010, and her traveling survey A Journey Through Mud and Confusion with Small Glimpses of Air moved through Moderna Museet, MART Rovereto, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt between 2018 and 2019. Her exhibition record has continued into the mid-2020s, including shows at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle (2024), the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (2023), and Galleri F15 in Moss, Norway (2025 to 2026).

Sources differ slightly on where she is currently based. Most gallery and museum biographies through the mid-2020s place her and Hans Berg in Berlin, Germany, while Swedish-language sources report that she has lived and worked in Alingsas, Sweden, since 2021. Both may reflect an ongoing binational practice; no source suggests she has stopped working or exhibiting.

Djurberg's critical standing rests on a sustained run of institutional recognition rather than market volume alone. The Silver Lion at the 2009 Venice Biennale was an early and significant validation, and it was followed by solo exhibitions at major institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, Fondazione Prada, the Walker Art Center, and Kestnergesellschaft. Her multi-venue touring exhibition at the end of the 2010s, and continued solo programming into 2025 and 2026 at venues from Lyon to Seoul to Seattle, point to an artist whose reputation among curators and museums has remained durable across roughly two decades of practice. Her work is consistently framed around the unsettling and taboo material she stages through clay animation and sculpture, in collaboration with Hans Berg's sound design.

Djurberg's auction record was set by Crocodile, Egg, Man, a silicone sculpture from her project The Black Pot, created with Hans Berg. It sold at Bukowskis in Stockholm in November 2020 for a hammer price of SEK 16,300,000, with press reports putting the total including premium at roughly SEK 19 million to 20 million (approximately USD 2.2 million at contemporaneous exchange rates). Swedish press at the time described it as the highest price ever paid for a contemporary Swedish artwork at auction. Her public auction history remains limited in volume, concentrated mainly through Bukowskis in Sweden, so this single result carries outsized weight in any market read.

Djurberg's works are frequently collaborative with Hans Berg and are often tied to specific multi-part projects, such as The Black Pot, which can complicate straightforward single-artist attribution and comparison across sales. There is no catalogue raisonne, and her public auction history is both recent and thin, anchored almost entirely by one exceptional 2020 result in Stockholm. Collectors should treat that record price as a data point shaped by a single strong sale rather than as evidence of a broad, liquid secondary market, and should rely on her representing galleries, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Lisson Gallery, for provenance and verification.