Siri Berg’s monochromes are only comprehensible in this age of mechanical reproduction. They are the human version of a digital product so commonplace that we can barely remember how historically recent it is: just as every color television videotape of forty years ago begins with a rainbow test-screen of solid vertical stripes an inch wide, the colorsample on the opening screen of photoshop includes a square of blue that diminishes in hue, or intensity, or saturation, as the pixels proceed to the right. This is absolutely easy for the math engine of the c.p.u. to produce. Conversely, it’s absolutely excruciating for a painter to achieve with a brush and a tube and a solvent. Just as Berg’s flat, fitted collages require a machinelike precision, her monochromes admire, and win, an almost inhuman severity in the application of the paint and the fading of the color from one side to the other.

Siri Berg: Then and Now is an exhibition of geometric abstraction. It includes paintings, collages and assemblages created over a period of several years. Within these different techniques a gradual but systematic exploration of color, form, pattern and texture developed. The repetition of geometric shapes is a method of art making which is essentially timeless. Initially there seems to be a striking difference the works into two group, some entirely black or white, others vibrantly polychromatic. But the whole body of work is characterized by a governing unity of thought. It coheres and commands and constitutes a timeless stasis that imitates only the most austere elements of nature. One example of her work exhibits this quality of agelessness is the modular system.

Kreab, the largest communications consultancy in the Nordic countries, has collaborated with Siri Berg since the 1980's. In and through her art she communicates with the representative optical range of human color vision. She continues to inovate both formally and in her use of new materials and media. Her art communicates over borders and in all cultural environments. And she represents the artist's vocation in the best sense of the word. Siri's art stands for the sort of personally invested labor that we at Kreab value very highly. Siri Berg brilliantly designed the covers of our Annual Reports for several key years in our company's history, and our corporate offices are decorated with several of her best pieces from the 80's and the 90's.

Siri Berg is a veteran Swedish artist involved with geometric abstraction. Her paintings have been compared to those by the younger American Peter Halley because of their simplified form and often elaborate texture, but they have no similar intellectual aspirations.

Berg's exhibition at the Swedish American Museum Center -- overlapping with one opening this week in the artist's native Stockholm -- presents both paintings and collages exclusively concerned with textural qualities and color. That means they may suffer a bit in relation to the current fashion for paintings with "concepts," though they are successful at the optical gratification they are about.

Berg has said she is interested in weighing such opposites as light and dark, heavy and light, fear and comfort. In the paintings on show, she works this out in ways the eye can follow, with unassailable visual logic. In her chosen format of the grid, the choices of composition, surface treatment and color are virtually impeccable, if also at times a bit too pared down to encourage long, sustained viewing.

The collages on view offer more. In the mid-1990s Berg began making prints according to the Japanese woodblock technique. Some of her collages make use of these prints, combining them with crisp rectangles of handmade Japanese papers. Other collage-paintings bring together colored and textured triangles to form compositions of no mean ambition.

A piece called "Microchip" is one of the most winning among those that make use of prints. It combines two grids of different scale and color with a narrow hard-edged vertical form presumably suggested by the title. The chromatic delicacy softens Berg's geometry, though at the same time the piece depends on firmness of structure. The opposites weighed might be seen as recessiveness and assertiveness. The balance is perfect.