Grand Inauguration
Luc Tuymans Against the Day,
Astrid Svangren what I remember…
SPECTACULAR TIMES: The 60s – The Moderna Museet Collection
26 December, 2009
Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22
SE-211 29 Malmö
Sweden
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm, Wednesday 11am-9pm
26 December, 2009, is a historic day for Moderna Museet: the opening date of Moderna Museet Malmö. One of Sweden’s most beautiful exhibition spaces, the former power station from 1901, has been extensively and carefully refurbished over the past year. A contemporary addition is the new annex, with its stylish façade of orange perforated sheet metal. Moderna Museet Malmö will offer almost 1000 square metres of exhibition space and will feature exhibitions of the most prominent contemporary artists and modern classics, together with a selection from Moderna Museet’s rich collection.
The grand inauguration of Moderna Museet Malmö will be on 26 December, 2009. The museum opens with three exhibitions.
Luc Tuymans
Against the Day
26.12 2009-25.4 2010
The Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is one of the most respected artists of his generation. The exhibition Against the Day presents 20 of his recent paintings. In this new series the focus is on virtual realities, fantasies and illusions. “Authentic forgeries” is how Luc Tuymans himself refers to his paintings. Each painting is based on an image taken from polaroids, cellphone cameras, computer animations and film stills. The title of the exhibition, Against the Day, is taken from the author Thomas Pynchon’s eponymous novel. As in Pynchon’s stories, paranoia is a recurrent theme in Luc Tuymans’ new series. CCTV, popular culture phenomena such as the reality TV show Big Brother and snipers are all portrayed here. The works are permeted by a sensation that reality has been put on pause. A course of events without beginning or end, but with a clear progression in time is shown. Characterized by a sublime and often quiet expression Luc Tuymans paintings nevertheless often captures a traumatic atmosphere.
Astrid Svangren
what I remember:
that I was hot with fear
a thin cloth
babble and a white collar
the maintaining of a condition
and all that I could not see
26.12 2009-14.3 2010
Astrid Svangren (b. 1972) strives in what I recall… to give the viewer a sense of being enveloped by the work of art. In recent years, her art has successively expanded into the room and by placing objects in the exhibition space, she generates a dialogue between image and object. But she also focuses on the viewer, who is positioned in the midst of the work. The wood screen in the exhibition, inspired by the ascetic Shaker movement, serves as a physical marker, and as a contrast to the structural complexity of the paintings. A closer study of Astrid Svangren’s pictorial world suggests that her images originate in dreams. Figures, naked and dressed, appear poetically, in various situations, in a painterly style varying from the exceedingly careful, small format, to the wildly, violent and aggressive. As viewers we are forced to find our own way into the image, to discover the diversity hidden therein, and to seek out the feelings we want to hold on to, and to explore them ourselves.
SPECTACULAR TIMES
The 60s – The Moderna Museet Collection
26.12 2009-27.2 2011
Moderna Museet Malmö’s first presentation of the Moderna Museet collection focuses on the 1960s, highlighting certain aspects of the American, French and Swedish art scene. Robert Rauschenberg’s famous goat Monogram greets us at the threshold of this revolutionary era when the concept of art was extended to include everything from spatial enactments, “environments”, to spectacular “happenings”. Artists broke free not only from the confines of the canvas and frame and the sculptural plinth but moved beyond the exhibition space, incorporating live and dead animals, mass-produced objects, advertising, newspaper cuttings, trash and rubbish in their works. French neo-realists combined found objects in “assemblages” or – as in the case of Jean Tinguely – assembled scrap iron into self-destructing machines with human attributes. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Lena Svedberg sought inspiration in different ways in the everyday life that was increasingly permeated with a flow of media images and the emerging consumer society.
SPECTACULAR TIMES will feature works from artists such as Bruce Conner, Lena Cronqvist, Öyvind Fahlström, Dan Flavin, John-E Franzén, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Bill Owens, Robert Rauschenberg, Martyal Raysse, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, James Rosenquist, Niki de Saint Phalle, Carolee Schneeman, Lena Svedberg, Jean Tinguely and Andy Warhol.
Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22
SE-211 29 Malmö
Sweden
