LOS ANGELES.- For her first solo exhibition in an American museum, Swedish-born, Berlin-based artist Nathalie Djurberg presents two new videos and an installation with related sculptures created during her Hammer residency. Her clay animation videos (with wildly inventive soundtracks composed by her collaborator Hans Berg) appear sweet and idyllic at first glance, but the action generally takes dark, twisted, and disturbing turns as her characters act out wild revenge fantasies and other violent scenarios. Djurberg was included in a 2006 Hammer Project, Animations. She has had solo exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Prada Foundation, Milan, and was included in the 4th berlin biennale.

Nathalie Djurberg was born in 1978 in Lysekil, Sweden, and was only nineteen when she got into Malmö Art Academy. At that time, she worked primarily with painting, but gradually began to experiment with Super 8 film. She, for instance, made a film of a painting with a sun rising and setting. When she then discovered the possibilities of plasticine, the films began to grow into small narratives. She did a bit of filming in one corner of her studio, not thinking at the time that it was proper art. It was only when an external tutor commented that the films did not fit in anywhere other than in art, that she got the courage to exhibit them.