Anna-Eva Bergman was born in Stockholm on May 29, 1909 to a Norwegian mother and a Swedish father. Her parents separated six months after she was born and her mother brought her to Norway where she later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo (1927) and at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna (1928). Bergman's writings and drawings show her sense of humor and observation, and demonstrate a virtuosic talent for drawing. Later, she would prove herself as an illustrator and journalist.In April 1929 she moved to Paris and enrolled at the André Lhote Academy where she met Hans Hartung. They got married the same year in Dresden. From 1933 to 1934, the couple lived on the island of Menorca in the Balearic Islands. The paintings and watercolors of this period show Bergman's interest in the golden ratio and architecture, and foreshadow the simple, constructed forms of her future work.After divorcing Hartung in 1938, Bergman returned to Norway where, up to 1945, she devoted herself mainly to illustration and writing. In 1946, she committed wholeheartedly to painting again and since then she began to paint with a non-figurative approach. Line and rhythm became fundamental. This period marks a major turning point in her artistic creation: she was inventing and building a singular universe little by little. She produced her first painting in gold leaf and definitively abandoned illustration.During the summer of 1950, Bergman took a boat trip along the Norwegian coast, visiting the Lofoten Islands and Finnmark. This trip was decisive in the evolution of her painting. With the tempera technique, she rediscovered the transparency of the landscapes and the light of the midnight sun. In 1951, following several summers spent in Citadelløya (southern Norway), Bergman produced paintings and drawings depicting the structure of rocks worn by the sea. From this series, which she called Fragments of an Island in Norway, came her first motif: stone (1952). This is a major transition in her work. Her painting then evolved towards the search for a limited number of simple motifs.In 1952, Bergman moved to Paris and found Hans Hartung again. They remarried in 1957.In 1958, in a series of works on paper of the same format, in tempera and metal leaf, Bergman used for the first time in painting the repertoire of forms that she had developed in her work since 1952: stone, moon, star, planet, mountain, stele, tree, tomb, valley, ship, prow and mirror. These archetypal forms inspired by Scandinavian nature and the powerful Nordic light would become the central elements of Bergman's work.In 1964, Bergman and Hartung traveled by boat along the Norwegian coast, past the North Cape. For several years, Bergman would use the sketches and photographs from this trip to in her work.The couple moved to Antibes in 1973 where together they designed their house and studios which later became the Hartung-Bergman Foundation. Bergman's work evolved towards increasingly simpler forms and a restricted color palette. She abandoned the construction of her paintings based on the golden ratio and added two themes to her vocabulary of forms: waves and rain.Anna-Eva Bergman died on Friday, July 24, 1987 at the hospital in Grasse.The latest solo exhibitions were held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in 2021, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France, in 2020, and at the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany, in 2018. She had many solo exhibitions in Norway, such as in 1969 at the museums of Oslo and Bergen, in 1979 at the Henie-Onstad Foundation and also in Sweden, Finland and Italy, at the Museo Civico of Turin in 1967; in the Biennial of São Paulo in 1969; in Germany, at the Kunsthalle of Düsseldorf in 1981–82; in Paris, at the Galerie de France where she exhibited regularly from 1958 to 1977 and at the musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris with a retrospective in 1977–78; in Antibes at the Picasso Museum in 1986, etc.