Sif Itona Westerberg

About the artist

Sif Itona Westerberg (b. 1985) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works primarily with sculpture, reliefs, and large-scale installations. 

In her artistic practice, Itona Westerberg draws strong inspiration from Antiquity, Greek mythology, and medieval narratives, reinterpreting them through the lens of urgent contemporary issues such as climate, new ecologies, care, relationships between humans and other species, and technologies and aesthetics in the Anthropocene era. In her art, she has invoked great figures such as Dionysus, Phaethon, and the Norns, seeking in their stories echoes and insights that resonate with the dilemmas of our present world.

For Itona Westerberg, humans and nature are deeply intertwined and connected. Recognizing this interconnectedness is essential to her practice. Through myth and storytelling, she fosters a renewed communion with the natural world, a grounding in spiritual and intuitive awareness, and a profound sense of kinship with other species and forms of life.

Itona Westerberg most often work with aerated concrete, which she carefully shapes by chiseling the motif meticulously out of the material. Aerated concrete is a raw and industrial building material, primarily valued for its practicality, but in Itona Westerberg’s practice, it is placed on equal footing with marble and bronze as the artist is drawn to the play with material hierarchies, where the refined and the humble coexist and challenge each other. 

Another direction in Itona Westerberg’s art practice, is her work with bronze statues. Itona Westerberg is interested in how women historically have been represented in bronze sculptures and the narratives embedded in these representations. In her bronze sculptures, Sif Itona engages in a dialogue with art history and explores how the body carries history, and how details in the depiction of women help convey and transmit these stories.

Itona Westerberg is also the artist behind the statuette Før Kastet, which is awarded as part of the Royal Couple’s Awards and statuette for the international music and science prize The Daphne Awards.