The Song Inside of Things is a new publication by California artist Helen Berggruen. Featuring oils on canvas and linen from her exhibition at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, in summer 2025, alongside other works made between 1994 and 2025, the book showcases a world where time is suspended, and people, objects and places flicker with restless vivacity. The book forms part of the Hurtwood Artist & Gallery Series.
With an insightful foreword by Berggruen Gallery’s Mary Kate Tankard, a detailed, extended essay by writer Craig Burnett, and a lively interview by Jeff Gunderson of the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation & Archive, the book illuminates Berggruen’s practice within a selection of forty-five of her most significant paintings.
Each publication in the Hurtwood Artist & Gallery Series presents new, recent and selected works by a single artist working nationally and internationally today. Along with a foreword by an established art world professional, the series features specially commissioned essays and interviews with the artist by leading writers, art historians and curators, offering in- depth insight. Central to each publication are the exhibitions and galleries that help to spotlight some of the most engaging artists of today.
The artist
After an early career in avant-garde theatre performing with such acclaimed directors as Robert Wilson and Peter Schumann, in the early 1980s Helen Berggruen stepped away from the theatre and began painting. Primary influences include Persian and Indian miniatures, Dutch seventeenth-century painters, Mantegna, Carpaccio, Constable, van Gogh, the post- Impressionists, French Fauvism and German Expressionism. Berggruen is based in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited throughout Iowa, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin and south-west France.
Editors: Anneka French
Designed by: Alice Daisy Pomfret
Contributors: Craig Burnett, Jeff Gunderson, Mary Kate Tankard
Size: 285 x 230 mm portrait
124 pages featuring 45 illustrations (colour)
Binding: Hardback
Printed in the UK
Published by Hurtwood
Anneka French 