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Erik A. Frandsen, Arbejdere.

Erik A. Frandsen, Neonlampe, Foto Ole Hein Pedersen.

Erik A. Frandsen, Bakke.

Erik A. Frandsen, Blomsterbillede.

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
Aros Allé 2
+45 8730 6600
Århus
Special Exhibition Gallery
Erik A. Frandsen –
The Double Space
10 October 2008-
4 January 2009

With the exhibition Erik A. Frandsen – The Double Space ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum presentd the largest collection ever of works by this Danish artist. The exhibition encompasses works from his entire oeuvre: from the wild paintings at the beginning of the 1980s to the brand-new mosaics done by the artist especially for this exhibition in ARoS. Erik A. Frandsen takes over the entire museum with his spectacular pictorial universe when over more than 2000 square metres — in the Special Exhibition Gallery, the Special Exhibition Foyer, the Museum Street and the stairway — he shows his great neon sculptures, steel flowers, glass mosaics, sculptures, paintings etc. Despite the fact that he has long enjoyed international recognition, the 51-year-old artist has never been presented on such a scale before. He made his international breakthrough as long ago as 1992, when he participated in the prestigious Dokumenta IX at Kassel. Since then, he has presented countless exhibitions both at home and abroad. Today, Erik A. Frandsen is moreover represented in Danish art museums by a larger number of works than any other artist.

The Neon Lamps’
Love Track
Erik A. Frandsen – The Double Space takes the visitor along with him on a journey through a total installation — from the fluorescent tubes in the foyer with Frandsen statements such as Lebensraum, White Power and Evergreen to the gigantic five-metre-in-diameter fluorescent lamp hovering in the large Special Exhibition Gallery. The beautiful and spectacular fluorescent lamp completes Erik A. Frandsen’s decoration of the Art Restaurant with the three impressive fluorescent lamps 90 centimetres in diameter and the four large Frandsen steel images with flower motifs from 2004. The fluorescent lamps, which are among the artist’s most recent works, were inspired by the lines drawn in the air by a pair of lovers’ hands when they are caressing each other. So the fluorescent signs are the tracks after an act of love.  
 
Dual Rooms
The exhibition is staged as double spaces with reflections and infinity effects. The Special Exhibition Gallery is divided into two large areas in which the colourful, floating fluorescent sculpture reflects its organic lines in large steel images and in a six-metre wide and six-metre high steel rotundas in the exhibition gallery alongside. Dual space is also presented in the steel images with flower motifs. The cool steel here reflects the wilting flowers that are projected into the images, preventing viewers from reflecting themselves without at the same time seeing the wilting flowers. Apart from the fact that the works revolve around a classic memento mori motif in a new form, they acquire an extra dimension when, by exposing the viewer as a guest in the art universe, Erik A. Frandsen establishes his characteristic dual view on art and reality. Most recently, Erik A. Frandsen has worked with mosaics, and for the exhibition in ARoS he has made ten new glass mosaics combining the ancient art form with photographic motifs — snapshots from the USA with references to American popular culture in the form of Disney, Spiderman and Marlboro. In motif, the mosaics present the visual reality in which we live today, but they also refer back to Antiquity, when mosaic art was the means and expression for circulating images. The mosaics have been made on the basis of photographic models in the artist’s book “The frozen moment desert”. The photographs are also shown in the exhibition. 
 
Eyefucking
Since the wild works of the 1980s, Erik A. Frandsen’s artistic project has been an insistent and intensive search for double space. By combining things that are recognisable with striking structures, physical objects and abstract forms, the artist creates a duality in which figure and structure challenge each other. The artist’s paintings are anything but oil on canvas; his signature is a form of sculptural painting with a variety of objects applied — rockwool, lead, plastic trays, photos, eggs and steel wire — which either are vehicles for meanings or block them out. The many layers or blocks leave the viewer with a sense of unsatisfied desire, of not being able quite to penetrate to the core of the meaning in these works. Erik A. Frandsen calls it “eyefucking” when the eye is sent roving about in and out among the figurative motif and the physical objects.  
 
The Frandsen Gaze
You can also in this exhibition experience Frandsen’s disturbing family pictures from the end of the 1990s, which expose the duality in Frandsen himself and the skewed view of reality that is the artist’s special characteristic. The pictures portray his family in everyday situations and give an immediate impression of a harmonious family life, but as viewers we do not feel quite comfortable in the family idyll. In the series about his family, the artist combines painting and photography but with Frandsen the guarantor of reality is not the photograph but rather the painting, which with its semi-abstract everyday realism constitutes a kind of representation of reality..

Pablo Picasso, Big Head, 1962. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

ARKEN
Skovvej 100
+45 43 54 02 22
Ishøj
Picasso & Women
September 27, 2008
-January 4, 2009

It is no secret that Picasso loved women – as models, muses, life companions and lovers. At the end of September ARKEN Museum of Modern Art presents 81 of the world-famous artist’s prints in the exhibition Picasso & Women. The light-sensitive (and therefore rarely exhibited) prints bring us close to Picasso as a man, a human being and an artist.

They are almost like pages from a diary, the 81 intimate Picasso prints in the new exhibition at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art. We can follow to the very date his interests and shifting styles at the time – from frolicsome, wry Cubism to detailed, precise realism. From Greek antiquity to Freudian inspiration. Behind the many changing styles and idioms we recognize the artist’s and ladykiller’s succession of lovers, wives, models and muses. For all the works have been chosen on the basis of their subject: women.

The Erotic and Beyond. Here we have decided portraits of the women in Picasso’s life – easily recognizable or artistically distorted. But there are also book illustrations and depictions of situations between man and woman, between artist and model, between artist and viewer; often with Picasso as man and artist in disguised self-portraits – as a young boy, as a practicing artist or as the Minotaur he loved to identify with.

In the prints we experience Picasso at his most erotically unbridled. It is as if the partly unpredictable technical process and the often intimate formats open the floodgates for a special intimacy. His last series of prints tend towards the pornographic, but they are always about more than sexuality. For Picasso the erotic is inextricably bound up with the process of artistic creation; for example in 8 September 1968 II (from the series 347) from 1968, where we see Picasso amorously engaged with his model, brush and palette in hand.

The works in Picasso & Women are therefore also about art as such: about creating art, varying one’s artistic expression and looking at art. You can actually see that a new artistic period often arises when he meets a new woman.

Master of Technique. Picasso is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Picasso & Women shows that he was also a formidable printmaker. There are examples of all the most important printing techniques that he mastered: etching, drypoint, lithography, aquatint and linocut. He loved to experiment, and was extremely prolific. Like no one else, he romped through all techniques and styles, and invented new ones himself.

The exhibition extends over the whole of Picasso’s career as an artist and printmaker, with works from 1905 up to 1970. All the prints are on loan from the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Because of their extreme sensitivity to light they are very rarely exhibited.

Pablo Picasso, Painter and knitting Model, 1927. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. © Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

Pablo Picasso, September 8 1968 II, 1968. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

Pablo Picasso, Salome, 1905. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picassobilledkunst.dk.

Pablo Picasso, Faune Unveiling a Woman, 1936. Photo © The Israel Museum, by Avshalom Avital. ©Succession Picasso-billedkunst.dk.

Wilhelm Freddie, Sex-paralyseappeal, 1936, Painted plaster, glass, rope, glove and wood, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Photo: Poul Pedersen.

Salvador Dali, Téléphone-homard (Lobster Telephone), 1936, Metal, plastic, and plaster, 30.5 x 18 x 12.5 cm, Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt.

Wilhelm Freddie, Meditation over den antinazistiske kærlighed, 1936

ARKEN
Skovvej 100
+45 43 54 02 22
Ishøj
Triumph of Desire –
Danish and
International Surrealism
September 6, 2008-
January 11, 2009

In the 1930s Surrealism spread like wildfire across Europe, led by Dalí, Magritte and Miró. Danish Surrealists from Wilhelm Freddie and Richard Mortensen to Heerup and Jorn were influenced by the international wave. But how was it expressed in their art?

ARKEN focuses on the dialogue that emerged between international ande Danish Surrealists in the 1930s. It has been 73 years since Danish and international Surrealism were last presented together in Copenhagen.

Conceived in Paris in the 1920s and spreading across Europe in the 1930s, Surrealism was one of the 20th century’s most influential and spectacular movements. Danish art was swept by the Surrealists’ wild ideas, sowing the seeds of the germinating CoBrA art in the 1940s. The Danish artists soaked up inspiration. Several of them exhibited alongside the better-known, international artists both at home and abroad. At ARKEN this dialogue manifests itself in a number of interesting encounters — between Dane Wilhelm Freddie’s Envoy of the Dream and Magritte’s In Memoriam Mack Sennett, for instance.

The time was heavily influenced by Freudian thought, as were the artists. The subconscious and, not least, the sex drive were the centre of attraction. ARKEN’s exhibition focuses on the erotic and sensual aspects in both nature and everyday objects. Salvador Dalí’s msterpiece Lobster Telephone is an example of an everyday object transformed into a exotic creature. A sensual, crawling and alien beast. Maybe it wriggles in your hand or scratches your ear?

Wilhelm Freddie’s famous work Sex Paralysis Appeal, which was confiscated in 1936 by the police, is shown in the exhibition. A female bust with a penis on its cheek, a rope around its neck and two wineglasses hanging nonchalantly on the décolletage. Like Dalí he transforms everyday objects into works of art with erotic, humorous and dangerous undertones.

To create art in direct contact with the subconscious, the Surrealists employed oddball and playful working methods. Inspired by the international Surrealists, Jorn did abstract “automatic drawings” which he invited other artists to continue. In automatic drawings the artist allows his instincts to govern the pen, thus giving the subconscious free rein. Another Surrealist method was folding drawings as we know them from children’s birthday parties: One person draws, folds the paper and passes it to the next person who continues without being able to see the previous drawing. From this Surrealist game shared pictures were created with strange motifs to tempt our imagination and desire to the surface.

Rita Kernn-Larsen, The Party, 1937, Oil on canvas, 136 x 156 cm, Museum Sønderjylland, Photo Karen Ahrenkiel.

Kara Walker, Calling to Me from the Angry Surface of Some Grey and Threatening Sea. I was Transported.

Kara Walker, Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress, UDSNIT.

Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.

Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.

Kara Walker, Untitled (Free Northern Girls).

Kara Walker, Do You Like Cream in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Millk?

GL Strand
Gammel Strand 48
+45/ 3336 0260
Copenhagen
Kara Walker
8 November 2008-
18 January 2009

Kara Walker, known for her seductively beautiful silhouette-scenarios about race, gender and differences, is one of the most complex and ambitious American artists in her generation. At the age of 27 she gained international recognition with her use of human-scale silhouette cuts that play with stereotypes in a style taken from the time around the American Civil War. With disturbing beauty and great wit the artist exposes the historic racism in order to question present problems in the depiction of race, sexuality, gender and identity.

In a diversity of media ranging from film and installation to puppet theatre, drawing, painting and the enormous characteristic silhouette cuts Walker explores the annoyances of the past and problems of the present in
the contrasts between fear and joy, love and hate, race and class, oppressor
and oppressed.

Within the recent years Kara Walker has exhibited at leading museums and festivals all over the world, including The Venice Biennial 2007, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The exhibition at GL Strand is organised in cooperation with Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. A richly illustrated catalogue is published in relation to the exhibition, among other things containing an extensive interview with Kara Walker.

Kara Walker (born November 26, 1969, Stockton, California) is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.

Walker's retired father is a formally educated artist, a professor, and an administrator. Her mother worked as an administrative assistant and was inspired by her family to reveal her own artistic talents. Walker's education includes an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in Painting / Printmaking, and a BFA in Painting / Printmaking at Atlanta College of Art.

Some of Walker's exhibitions have been shown at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Walker has also been shown internationally and featured on PBS. Her work graces the cover of musician Arto Lindsay's recording, Salt (2004).

Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African American women in particular. However, because of her confronting approach to the topic, Walker's artwork is reminiscent of Andy Warhol's Pop Art during the 1960s (indeed, Walker says she adored Warhol growing up as a child). Her nightmarish yet fantastical images incorporate a cinematic feel. Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how white people depicted African American slaves during Antebellum South. Some of her images are grotesque, for example, in The Battle of Atlanta, a white man, presumably a Southern soldier, is raping a black girl while her brother watches in shock, a white child is about to insert his sword into a nearly-lynched black woman's vagina, and a male black slave rains tears all over an adolescent white boy.
In 1997, Walker, 28 at the time, was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur fellowship.

In response to Hurricane Katrina, Walker created After the Deluge, since the hurricane had devastated many poor and black areas of New Orleans. Walker was bombarded with news images of "black corporeality," including fatalities from the hurricane reduced to bodies and nothing more. She likened these casualties to African slaves piled onto ships for the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing to America.
“ I was seeing images that were all too familiar. It was black people in a state of life-or-death desperation, and everything corporeal was coming to the surface: water, excrement, sewage. It was a re-inscription of all the stereotypes about the black body.”

In 2007, Walker was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, Artists and Entertainers, in a citation written by fellow artist Barbara Kruger. Walker lives in New York and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.

Kara Walker, Calling to Me from the Angry Surface of Some Grey and Threatening Sea. I was Transported.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Uden Titel.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Uden Titel.

GL Strand
Gammel Strand 48
+45/ 3336 0260
Copenhagen
Nils Erik Gjerdevik
8 November 2008-
18 January 2009

The entire third floor in the exhibition hall GL Strand is taken over by an insistent installation by renowned Danish artist Nils Erik Gjerdevik whose works of bright colours and ruptured forms challenge our perception of abstract art.

With a both playful and orderly installation specifically created for the gallery space of GL Strand Gjerdevik meets the audience with an inferno of the senses which he refers to as “anti-authoritarian.”

Nils Erik Gjerdevik is born in Norway in 1964. He studied at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1984 and has since held a central position in Danish abstract art. He is known for his original and innovative approach to the history of abstract and expressionistic art and has contributed to a number of public decorations, including one at Copenhagen University Amager and Copenhagen Opera House.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik’s images balance on the border of the recognizable and the unknown, the orderly and the expressive. In a compact installation of both painting, drawing and ceramic sculpture Gjerdevik allows for a dynamic dialogue between the works to unfold.

”Everything is carried out in a precisely measured relationship between intuition and control. The synthetic colour scheme of Gjerdevik’s paintings smells of plastic and Donald Duck, but at the same time demonstrates refined interplay. Hidden in Gjerdevik’s works are cryptic taxonomies which again and again are challenged by pattern breaks and sudden mutations”, says Curator Pernille Fonnesbech.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue and texts by art historian Christian Foghmar and visual artists Ferdinand Ahm Krag and Christian Vind.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Uden Titel.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Uden Titel.

Nils Erik Gjerdevik, Uden Titel.

Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), Summer. Study with Three Women and a Child, Ca 1623, Muzeul National Brukenthal, Sibiu.

Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), Homage to Ceres, Ca 1618-23, El Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), Martyrdom of St Quentin, Ca 1650, Watercolor, gouache, 406 x 293 mm, Biblioteca, Turin.

Statens Museum
for Kunst
Sølvgade 48-50
Copenhagen
T +45 3374 8494
Jordaens
The Making of a Masterpiece
8 November 2008-
1 February 2009

Jordaens. The Making of a Masterpiece marks the completion of a 13-month-long restoration of one of the most important works in the Museum — as well as in Jordaens’ oeuvre: the 279,5 x 467 cm. large painting The Tribute Money. Peter Finding the Silver Coin in the Mouth of the Fish (also called The Ferry Boat to Antwerp) from c. 1623. The thorough restoration has been carried out live in an open workshop. Visitors have been able to follow the small but visible steps day by day; the Museum’s conservators have also told about their work and what surprises lay hidden on and under the surface of the gigantic painting. During the process, the painting was joined by another work by Jordaens which underwent an almost corresponding treatment in the open workshop. This patient, which arrived from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is a smaller variation of the same theme. Both paintings have now assumed a central position in the present exhibition in practically the same magnificent state as when they left Jordaens’ workshop almost 400 years ago.

Secrets under the surface
An international interdisciplinary collaboration between art historians, conservators and scientists has laid the ground for this research. For example, x-ray photographs and infra-red studies of the paintings have revealed that large parts of the motif in the Rijksmuseum painting are repeated under the visible surface of the large Copenhagen version. This is an unexpected discovery, which completely reverses the chronology of the two versions of The Tribute Money. Chemical investigations of colour layers have definitively rebuffed the suspicion that some of the eight sections of canvas in all in the Copenhagen version may have been added by some other artist than Jordaens. Instead, these revelations give us the picture of an uncompromising artist who made his way doggedly and painstakingly towards perfection.

Jordaens from all sides
The exhibition Jordaens. The Making of a Masterpiece communicates the results of this new research and documents the working process of the artist. It also reveals his ambition to create a new expression by painting stories alive with a rich variety of feelings manifested by physical movement and facial expression. A carefully chosen selection of other paintings by Jordaens also reveals how he worked with a sort of catalogue of facial expressions, bodies and postures, which he repeated and perfected from picture to picture. And last but by no means least, there are a number of works in the exhibition by Jordaens’ contemporary colleagues Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Snijders, throwing him into relief as one of the very finest Baroque artists.

The exhibition is the result of close collaboration with the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, where it will be shown from 13 March to 14 June 2009.

Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a large and fully illustrated book which goes even deeper under the surface and lays out the various approaches and results of the most recent research, giving a thorough picture of Jordaens, his works and his time. Articles by: Troels Filtenborg, Lars Hendrikman, Badeloch Noldus, Karsten Ohrt, Eva de la Fuente Pedersen, Annefloor Schlotter, Johanna H. Verhave, and Jørgen Wadum.

Jordaens. The Making of a Masterpiece, 120 pages. Price: 148 DKK. ISBN 978-97-92023-26-1, The book is published in collaboration with the Bonnefantenmuseum, and was made possible thanks to the support of The Getty Foundation.

Statens Museum
for Kunst
Sølvgade 48-50
Copenhagen
T +45 3374 8494
Reality Check
September 6, 2008
-January 4, 2009

Reality Check checks out the realities of art, while art is checking out ours. Thirty-nine international contemporary artists take the temperature of reality in a number of groundbreaking works. Or rather, they extend and turn our normal notions upside down, giving us reality as we have never before experienced it.

The exhibition gives very precise insights into recent art, also bringing in individual older artists who have been forerunners in various ways of the extended concept of art which is prevalent today. The many works comprise all genres from painting and sculpture to installation, photography and video, as well as combinations of them. From works on a tiny scale to gigantic manifestations. There are minute recreations of real rooms, unflinching self-portraits, spectacular interactive installations and tough documentarism. There is the aging DJ Willy, a bike ride on LSD, moving exhibition rooms and a flying steamroller.

The exhibition is based on research into the art of the last two decades and lays out clearly the directions of a number of basically very different artistic productions. What is special about these works is also that they have a particular thirst for reality, which is, however, very far from the stationary and passive registration of the world around us provided by traditional realism. Instead we experience works of art that intervene in reality in radical ways so as to investigate, test and reveal the mechanisms and structures which can displace reality or even reveal it as a construction.

The English installation artist Mike Nelson (b. 1967) is the artist responsible for the autumn exhibition in x-rummet, which is an integral part of Reality Check this time, and extends over a whole floor of the museum. Nelson, who has twice been nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, has astounded the world in recent years with his great series of rooms and corridors, which are conceptually and architecturally connected in complex scenarios. These installations on a 1:1 scale are based on a web of references to literature, films, history and politics, but they have an immediate and enormous suggestive material effect. Dark-rooms, offices, artists’ studios, changing rooms, gambling dens, private rooms and shops are all among the ambiguous functional references which Nelson employs. His re-use of materials and objects with patina and showing wear and tear gives the impression of recent activity.

Reality Check extends over more than 3,000 square meters of the three large exhibition halls, a whole floor of Statens Museum for Kunst’s white building as well as the front hall and space in front of the museum. This means that contemporary art unfolds itself on a hitherto unseen scale and in a form which both challenges and embraces the museum and its guests. The exhibition not only shows works by some of the most important modern artists, it is also technically the most demanding and spectacular exhibition in the history of the museum.

Participating artists include: Bas Jan Ader (Holland), Pawel Althamer & Artur Zmijewski (Poland), Michel Auder (France), Matthew Buckingham (USA), Chris Burden (USA), Jeremy Deller (England), Elmgreen & Dragset (Denmark/Norway), Peter Fischli & David Weiss (Switzerland), Ceal Floyer (England), Anna Gaskell (USA), Felix Gmelin (Sweden), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Cuba), Douglas Gordon (Scotland), Rodney Graham (Canada), Aneta Grzeszykowska (Poland), David Hammons (USA), Annika von Hausswolff (Sweden), Jeppe Hein (Denmark), Judith Hopf (Germany), Henrik Plenge Jakobsen (Denmark), Joan Jonas (USA), Joachim Koester (Denmark), Zoe Leonard (USA), Ann Lislegaard (Norway), Enrique Metinides (Mexico), Mike Nelson (England), Henrik Olesen (Denmark), Susan Philipsz (Scotland), Walid Raad (Lebanon), Anri Sala (Albania), Simon Starling (England), Vibeke Tandberg (Norway), Sam Taylor-Wood (England), Fred Tomaselli (USA), Gitte Villesen (Denmark), Danh Vo (Vietnam).

Douglas Gordon (b. 1966), Monster Reborn, Statens Museum for Kunst, 2002.

Ann Lislegaard (b. 1962), Nothing but Space, Statens Museum for Kunst, 1997.

Mike Nelson (b. 1967), Mirror infill, Frieze Art Fair, London. Photo: Linda Nylind, 2006.

Bas Jan Ader (1942-1975). I'm too sad to tell you, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1971.

Zoe Leonard (b. 1961), Mouth Open, Teeth Showing, Courtesy Western Bridge, Seattle, 2000.

Statens Museum
for Kunst
Sølvgade 48-50
Copenhagen
T +45 3374 8494
Kirsten Ortwed.
Full Length
June 14, 2008-
March 8, 2009

Iron chains, gratings, trolleys, wax as well as an immensely heavy, 13 metre-long bronze sculpture. Kirsten Ortwed’s enigmatic sculptures will occupy all of the 2,000 m² of The Sculpture Street as well as neighbouring exhibition rooms, when as Sculptor of the Year at Statens Museum for Kunst she is responsible for a monumental and retrospectively organised exhibition.

It is quite justified to call the sculptor Kirsten Ortwed (b. 1948) a unique phenomenon in recent Danish art. She has single-mindedly and unreservedly concentrated on an unusually independent and original exploration of the possibilities of sculpture. She has an unparalleled sensitivity as to the most intimate possibilities of her materials, which lies behind the artistic idiom which is totally her own; at the same time, experimentation and an interest in the unpredictable have given her continual impetus. She has acquired international recognition over the years for her artistic shaping of the public space, for example, and her works are to be found at a great number of museums both at home and abroad.

Ortwed is a sculptor through and through. More than the majority of her fellow artists, she whole-heartedly follows — and is involved in — every stage of the work on her sculptures, from the very first tentative idea to the final finish. If she is classically inclined as to the work process, she is equally untraditional in her uncompromising investigation of various idioms and materials. Ortwed’s sculptures never get stuck in the rut of stylistic repetitiveness. The formats vary in scale from the monumental and almost monstrous to the dainty. As regards materials, she is just as at home with hard bronze or granite, for example, as with everyday objects of varying sizes, and even to softer and more transitory materials like fabric, wax and newspapers.

Ortwed’s works have an almost disturbing introversion and do not make any concessions to their surroundings. At the same time, however, they do not demand any particular theoretical knowledge of their observers. In fact they are there as immediate and pure sculptures, which means that they stress their own premises, like form, surface and correspondence with their surroundings, rather than function, representation or recognition. This combination of hard and soft elements, at times fairly contrastive, establishes surrealistic undercurrents hinting at elements such as discipline, torture and sadomasochism. But Ortwed never allows her works to drop off into conclusion and unambiguous positions. Instead she presents them as open and in their own way unbounded investigations of the unknown and unproven in the art of sculpture. Or, as the sculptor herself says, “I want to experience more than I already know.”

The exhibition at Statens Museum for Kunst occupies the Museum’s 2,000 m² large Sculpture Street and an adjoining exhibition room, and affords a retrospective cross-section of Kirsten Ortwed’s oeuvre ”in full length” from the 1970s and up to today. Full Length is also the title of the 13 metre-long bronze sculpture which Ortwed has specially created with a view to matching and challenging the enormous space of the Sculpture Street. The other axis of the Sculpture Street is occupied by Ortwed’s contribution to the Venice Biennial in 1997, the sculpture group Tons of Circumstances, which Statens Museum for Kunst has just acquired with support from Hermod Lannung’s Museum Foundation.
Free entrance to the exhibition

Publication: Kirsten Ortwed Full Length,
Hardcover book, 184 pages, Danish and English 199,00 Dkr,
ISBN: 978-87-92023-16-2, preface by Karsten Ohrt, introduction by Jacob Wamberg; essays by Lise Skytte Jakobsen and Britta Tøndborg, an interview of the artist by Per Jonas Storsve. The book is available in the Museum’s bookshop.

Kirsten Ortwed (f. 1948), Full Length, 2008.

Kirsten Ortwed (f. 1948), Full Length (detail), 2008, Photo: Iben Bølling Kaufmann.

Kirsten Ortwed (f. 1948), Platform, 2006.

Kirsten Ortwed, Photo: Iben Bølling Kaufmann.