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25/12/2009

The opening exhibitions of Moderna Museet Malmo

Moderna Museet, Malmo

On 26 December, 2009, the art map of the Malmö and Öresund region will be substantially enriched. Moderna Museet Malmö opens in the impressive power station from 1901, designed by John Smedberg on Gasverksgatan 22.

These used to be the premises of the now defunct Rooseum centre for contemporary art. The architects Tham & Videgård Hansson have redesigned the building into a modern museum. Moderna Museet Malmö opens with three exhibitions: Belgian Luc Tuymans, one of the most renowned artists of our time, a group show focusing on the 1960s featuring works from the Moderna Museet collection, and Copenhagen-based Astrid Svangren.

Astrid Svangren
What I Remember...
Malmö - 26 December 2009 - 21 March 2010

Astrid Svangren (born in 1972) graduated from Malmö Art Academy a little more than ten years ago. Since then she has participated in a great number of solo and group exhibitions, where she has received a lot of attention for her painting and the visual worlds she creates. Today she lives and works in Copenhagen.

A process is made visible in her pictures, to become a woman, to become an artist, to paint and experiment with a number of materials. The ambivalence in the paintings, in combination with her choice of material, creates a tension that is used to describe the border between the illusory room of the painting, and the room and the material’s three-dimensional character.

Her painting seeks towards another order, she strives to break down hierarchies in the image space, to avoid any particular focus in the paintings. Instead there is a rich visual world that depicts events in different directions, figures that she herself describes as clumsy, imponderable and in movement. She often uses coloured or see through acrylic glass and applies the colour on both sides, thus creating a three-dimensional impression. This effect strengthens and deepens the relations that emerge in the pictures between figures, material and events.

One can easily get the feeling that Astrid Svangren collects her visual world from dreams. Poetic figures, both naked and dressed, emerge in the pictures, and is painted in a way that varies between a very gentle, small format, to violent and aggressive. Astrid Svangren says herself that she wants to capture an emotion, an experience or a mood, without being too specific.

During the last years her work has moved towards a greater spatialness, the pieces grows and claim the whole room. In her latest work she returns to using colours and figures, after having deepened in abstraction and dark, often black colour scale. The difficult given and labyrinth-like spatialness that are being depicted in Astrid Svangrens images is now being moved into the existing room which makes the observer a part of the work. Her way of painting and choice of material problematize in a subtle way painting as media, and her image world puts vulnerability, identity and emotions hard to describe into focus.

Astrid Svangren will present all new work at the opening exhibition, which will fill the new gallery now being built for Moderna Museet Malmö.

There is public art by Astrid Svangren in Gävle, Kristianstad and Malmö.

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Luc Tuymans
Against the Day
Malmö - 26 December 2009 - 25 April 2010

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is one of the most respected painters of his generation, and therefore Moderna Museet Malmö is proud to present his exhibition Against the Day at the opening of the museum. The exhibition contains 20 newly produced works.

Against the Day is part of what Luc Tuymans refers to as a triptych, which began with Les Revenants and Restoration about the power of the Jesuit Order, and continued with Forever. The Management of Magic, relating to the world phenomena Walt Disney. The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans is known for his often bleach, blurred, photo based paintings where he deals with politics and religion, pop culture, power and his childhood.

Luc Tuymans, convinced that original pictures do not exist, has called his paintings “authentic forgeries”. All pictures are influenced by another picture. Luc Tuymans’ are based on already existing drawings, photos, found images, stills from films, etc. Despite the classical expression in his paintings, he also masters the modern technique very well. Some of his pictures are taken with an iPhone and others are digitally manipulated before using them for his paintings.

”The show presents an end, showing things as raw material, dispersed and disjointed, simultaneously offering more and more propositions, but basically going nowhere. It is the world as we know it”, says Luc Tuymans about the exhibition. The new series, Against the Day, focus on virtual reality, illusions and fantasies. The title, Against the Day, is adopted from the book by Thomas Pynchon with the same title. Thomas Pynchon introduced paranoia in American literature, and he is also Luc Tuymans’ favourite American writer.

This paranoia can be found in the new works by Luc Tuymans in terms of surveillance cameras, pop cultural themes like the reality series Big Brother, and snipers. More is left out than shown. Rather the viewer has to fill the void. Sometimes it is like a film rolling by, where the beginning and end is missing. Only small details are shown. Recurrent original angels and close-ups also reveals Luc Tuymans’ past as a film maker. The two paintings, Against the Day I and II, show a man in a garden. In the former he is working, and in the latter he is frozen by fear. Yet again an event without beginning or an end, but with a clear movement of time. In a subtle way, Luc Tuymans captures a traumatic feeling in his paintings. What is left out creates several interpretations and layers.

Luc Tuymans is represented by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, and by David Zwirner in New York. In 2010, several American museums have invited him to have large solo exhibitions at their institutions, and his works are to be found in numerous large museum collections.

The exhibition Against the Day, is produced in co-operation with Wiels Center for Contemporary Art in Brussels.
Luc Tuymans Against the day is supported by E.ON Sweden. A new catalogue will be available.

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Spectacular Times
The 60s - The Moderna Museet Collection

In our first presentation of Moderna Museet’s collection, we have chosen to focus on the 60s. A time in which the art is characterized by a drive to approach a reality outside the gallery space and to a greater extent fuse with life itself. Here we meet Robert Rauschenberg’s famous goat, Monogram, on the threshold into a new era where the concept of art widens and where high and low, kitsch and fine culture, are mixed with both seriousness and play. Artists like Andy Warhol, Marie-Louise Ekman and Claes Oldenburg seeks inspiration in an everyday life that more than ever before is pervaded by media’s image flow and the growth of a consumerist society. Here a Filet mignon is presented in the form of a poorly painted plaster and plastic sculpture, and repeated reproductions of Marilyn Monroe stands alongside of Campbells soup cans, as reversed portraits of the mass as a subject.

The 60s is an era of glossy and shiny surfaces, big cars and hollywoodesque glamour, but also of military arms race, fast food and the beginning of a stunning uniformity. While Öyvind Fahlström draws the play rules of the new world order and the power struggle between the players of the game, artists like Lena Svedberg and Lena Cronqvist portraits the seamy side of the consumer society – the alienation, seclusion, anxiety.

The 60s is also a period we associate with a minimalistic idiom. As a reaction against the emotionally loaded painting of abstract expressionism, artists like Donald Judd wants to break free from the canvas, move out in the room and cleanse the art object of a pre-constructed meaning. To depersonalise the creative process he uses industrially produced and standardised materials such as plywood and galvanized steel. His colleague Eva Hesse also explores a reduced aesthetic, but charges her abstract objects with an elusive and multifaceted, bodily presence. The awareness of the regenerating drives and effects of a patriarchal order increases during this period of time and we see how works by Yayoi Kusamas gets covered by some kind of virus like, phallic growth.

In year 1958, Moderna Museet opens it’s doors for the first time and develops during the 60s into a bubbling, experimental and international meeting place for art, film, dance, poetry and music. Many still remember groundbreaking exhibitions such as Movement in Art and Niki de Saint Phalles, PO Ultvedts and Jan Tinguelys She, where the visitors were invited into the womb of a 25 metre long female figure. It was also during these years that The Museum of our Wishes presented works that one wished would be part of Moderna Museet’s collection. The exhibition led to a one time grant of five million Swedish kronor and ultimately to a crucial step in the development of Moderna Museet.

Here in Malmö we have chosen, in our first presentation of the collection of Moderna Museet, to highlight the 60s in its multi-faceted appearance. This period of time is strongly represented in Moderna Museet’s collection and the decade constitutes an important period in the origin of Moderna Museet. It’s also interesting how strongly the art during this period of time connects to our own time. The media and consumerist society, which rooted during the 60s, has today reached a global level where we no longer can talk about its inside and outside. We have all become actors in a globalised economy where our perception of ourselves and the world around us is dominated by virtual images and representations.

For more information and press images please contact: Sofia Alsterhag Marketing & PR
s.alsterhag@modernamuseet.se

Image: Lena Svedberg, Konsumentkvinnan 1968, © Lena Svedberg/BUS 2009

Opening 26 December 2009

Moderna Museet
Gasverksgatan 22, Malmo
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday 11am-6pm
Wednesdays 11am-9pm
Mondays closed
Admission 50 SEK, 40 SEK (reduced price)
Free entrance for those under 18

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