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18/4/2008

Inside Modernism

Landskrona Kunsthalle, Landskrona

Axel Lieber is a sculptor and an active teacher and visiting professor at various art schools in Sweden and abroad. He was educated at Staatliche Kunstakademie (the State Art Academy) in Dusseldorf and is a member of the artists’ collective “Inges Idee,” which is dedicated to art in public places.

Jörgen Carlo Larsen, also a sculptor, was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He is a member of the Danish Arts Foundation Expert Committee for Environmental Art.

Axel Lieber and Jörgen Carlo Larsen are artists whose work combines humour, wisdom and inventiveness
with sculpture.

Inside Modernism

Landskrona Konsthall was designed in 1963 by architects Sten Samuelsson and Fritz Jaenecke. The severe architecture in concrete and glass is considered one of the prime examples of Swedish modernism. The modernist aesthetic of the museum is the foundation of the entire exhibition, as Axel Lieber and Jörgen Carlo Larsen work with parallels between the building as an art museum and the building as a home. They use the museum as a laboratory to explore the nuances of modernism, undogmatically and personally. The artists move between the sweeping ideas of modernism and the details that have set their stamp on them in concrete terms, as people and as sculptors. The exhibition becomes a kind of “modernism revisited,” where they playfully examine the ideas that originated from that time.

For instance, Ray and Charles Eames, key figures in the “new” modernism after the Second World War, were one point of departure for the exhibition. Their work spanned a broad field – from designing houses and furniture to being enlightening educators, always with a sense of fun. A photograph of the Eames couple peering into one of their house models was one of the catalysts for the exhibition concept at
Landskrona Konsthall.

The exhibition is built around a number of modules, including Greenhouse, a kind of model of the museum in and of itself. Herbs and vegetables are grown inside that are used to prepare the soup that visitors are offered and can pick up in Abstract Cooking, an abstract sculpture that is also a kitchen. The dishes used to serve the soup are the ones used in the exhibition’s looped video, Building up, Falling down. In the video, the artists build an urban landscape using white, everyday household dishes – a game with things found around the house that blends the micro and macro perspectives.

It is precisely the shift between the micro and macro perspectives – along with the life cycle, with circles appearing and reappearing in various ways – that ties the exhibition together. The artists want to mix the experiences and give onlookers an opportunity to “travel” through space and time, through different scales, through then and now, and to switch between being active and passive. Art is mixed with the mundane, and the changes of perspective are exhilarating.

The “donut” shape of the building, with the atrium courtyard forming the centre hole, is used to create a lamp. The atrium courtyard is covered in a coloured foil, casting a very special light over the exhibition. The entire gallery is thus transformed into a massive lamp in reference to the famous rice paper lamps designed by the Japanese-American designer and sculptor Isamu Nogushi.

A number of sculptures that interact with the exhibition are placed in the park surrounding the museum. Lieber and Larsen invited fourteen other artists to contribute their visions, in model form, of what a sculpture park might look like fifty years from now. The proposals are presented as the utopian group exhibition Sculpture Park 2058 inside the museum, where the visitor can look at them and the existing sculptures in the park at the same time.

Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall
Inside Modernism is the second of three exhibitions in the Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall project, a joint initiative of Kultur Skåne and the Municipality of Landskrona.

Landskrona Kunsthalle
Slottsgatan - Landskrona
Hours Tuesday 12-17, Wednesday – Sunday 13-17. Closed Mondays.

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