Irving Penn: Diverse Worlds, Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden

Irving Penn: Diverse Worlds
Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden
16 June - 2 September, 2012 

For the first time in the Öresund region, a rich selection of IRVING PENN’s photographs from some of his most famous serial photography are presented. His innovative fashion features, portraits and still-lifes made Irving Penn one of the leading photographers of our time. Spanning more than 60 years, his career is characterised by a cool, minimalist approach to the medium. With a selection of nearly 90 works and samples from his assignments for numerous publications, the exhibition at Moderna Museet Malmö covers a broad spectrum of Irving Penn’s oeuvre.

Irving Penn (1917-2009) is regarded as one of the leading photographers of our time. He was active in both the commercial and artistic fields. In 1985, he won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In his terse serial works, Irving Penn developed a style that is distinguished by its sharpness, detail, meticulousness and minimalist imagery. The exhibition Diverse Worlds presents photographs from his most famous series and spans more than half a century. Most of these works were donated to Moderna Museet in 1995 by Penn himself, in memory of his wife, Swedish-born Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn.

Diverse Worlds is a broad resumé of Irving Penn’s oeuvre, revealing clearly the consistent style that is characteristic of his photographs. His output is typically imbued with an inquisitive eye and attention to detail, whatever the subject matter. A discussion of the commercial-artistic dichotomy seems rather pointless in the case of Irving Penn, who balanced constantly between the two, allowing one to benefit the other. His experience and background as a painter, for instance, came in handy when he was commissioned by established fashion houses to create their advertisements for publications such as Vogue – a magazine Penn worked for throughout most of his career.

In post-war New York, many cultural celebrities visited Irving Penn’s studio. The turmoil that prevailed after the Second World War was illustrated by portraying these ostensibly immortal icons trapped in a narrow corner. Penn has also related how this corner was created in his studio to counteract his own feelings of inferiority in relation to the celebs he portrayed. The less famed were also captured by Irving Penn’s camera, including small tradesmen in London and Paris, and members of Hell’s Angels in San Francisco. Life’s transience is distinctly visualised in many of the still-lifes Penn made in his career – often commissioned by fashion houses but also as part of his own projects.

Despite the variation in these pictorial series, Irving Penn’s oeuvre, and the presentation in Diverse Worlds, reveals a consistent curiosity and desire, and a wish to depict the divergent subjects in the same sensitive and detailed way. He achieved this by placing them all in the same setting. Different image worlds meet and are literally constructed in the same neutral space – Irving Penn’s studio.

Curators: Andreas Nilsson and John Peter Nilsson

Moderna Museet Malmö

Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö
www.modernamuseet.se

Klara Lidén, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Klara Lidén
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
14 May - 9 October, 2011

Moderna Museet is the first museum in the world to present a complete exhibition of Klara Lidén. Her major exhibitions to date have been outside Sweden, and have attracted astonishing acclaim from critics and the public, but until now she has been relatively unknown in Sweden. This exhibition is organised jointly with the Serpentine Gallery in London and includes every facet of her oeuvre from 2003 to the present day: videos, stills, installations and a series of painted wall sculptures.

The overall concept is a ghostly labyrinth with an unexpected secret chamber, designed especially by Klara Lidén for Moderna Museet. The entrance to the exhibition has also been moved, to stress the many ways in which a building can be used.

Architecture and urban planning are central to Klara Lidén’s oeuvre. She originally studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2000-2003, but then went to Berlin for a year. There she switched to art and enrolled at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, where she studied between 2004 and 2007. In her work, but also in her activism in urban spaces, Klara Lidén reminds us of the complex interplay between the individual and the collective. She challenges our most fundamental perceptions of private and public spaces, and explains:

“I am partly the poor architect dealing with the problem of existing structures in a city, and partly the amateur dancer or performance artist who wants to convey ideas about rhythm and construction, or about reclaiming our built environment.”

In her video work Paralyzed from 2003, Klara Lidén ignores the etiquette of the public domain and performs an anarchic, wild dance on a commuter train. Paralyzed is also about collectively being alone, since she does not make direct contact with any of her fellow-commuters. In Klara Lidén’s installations, visitors often have to literally negotiate her constructions, which insist on being acknowledged. Now, she is going the full monty and “disturbing” the habitual museum experience with her labyrinthine enactment.

“Every day, all over the world, people travel by underground or bus, wait at crossings, stand in queues or drive on the correct side of the road. It is astounding that this communality actually works. Klara Lidén’s art reminds us, however, of how fragile this community is. Sometimes it is even forced upon us. She wants me to feel uncomfortable about my deceptive longing for perpetual security,” says the curator, John Peter Nilsson.

In the exhibition catalogue, John Kelsey poignantly describes Lidén’s art as “architectonic hooliganism”. One night, for instance, she removed all advertising posters in central Stockholm and replaced them with a transparent sticker bearing the title of this action: U TRY MME, (2002). This can be read as the Swedish word “utrymme”, which means “space”, but also as the English phrase “You try me” – a comment on who has the right to our public sphere.

This major solo exhibition at Moderna Museet features several videos, slide projections and large-scale installations. It also includes the apartment installations Unheimlich Manöver, which was shown at Moderna Museet in 2007.

MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM
www.modernamuseet.se