Beate Wassermann @ Moderna Museet, Malmö - Balancing Acts - Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann

Beate Wassermann: Balancing Acts

Moderna Museet, Malmö

Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann

Through February 20, 2022

BEATE WASSERMANN

From the cycle "Balance", 1997 

© Beate Wassermann/Wassermann Estate

Balancing Acts is the first exhibition in Scandinavia of BEATE WASSERMANN (1947 – 2018). With works spanning five decades, the exhibition explores the many facets of Wassermann’s unique painting.

Beate Wassermann grew up in post-war Germany which had a strong impact on her. Her powerful, mainly abstract paintings were inspired by everyday life and the profane as well as the sacred – two spheres that she never considered contradictory. Wassermann developed a profoundly singular style of painting. In her works, often in large formats, she condensed what she saw around her into signs or symbol-like shapes.

- Beate Wassermann perceived colours and shapes as animated energies, says curator of the exhibition, Museum Director Iris Müller-Westermann. The image was her mental and directly physical field of dialogue. Her painterly practice explores the role of artist, human being, woman and mother – as in the early self-portrait “Madonna von Altona” from 1979, where the highly pregnant artist is standing in a beam of light, with paint brushes in her hair like a crown of thorns, wearing pointed, elegant shoes. Her paintings are highly physical, always with proportions that relate to her own body. Balancing different aspects of life, shapes and colours, light and darkness, the near and the distant, is central to Wassermann’s oeuvre.

Beate Wassermann saw herself as a collector, finding forms and structures in everyday life that felt familiar on a deeper level. Painting was an ongoing contemplation to her. She perceived her images as likenesses of experiences and the paintings became answers to her own questions. From the mid-1990s, when she began creating glass windows for churches and other public, monumental buildings, her paintings reached new levels of freedom and gradually lightened from within.

Beate Wassermann studied at the Art Academy, first in Berlin, then in Hamburg. She lived and worked in Hamburg-Altona and periodically in Italy. Wassermann’s work has been shown in Germany and other countries in Europe. Balancing Acts is the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, offering an insight into how her images sprang from earlier pictures, and how themes were modified and resumed throughout her career.

With this exhibition Moderna Museet Malmö contributes yet again to highlighting exciting and important women artists who have been overlooked in a male-dominated art world. In connection with the exhibition, Moderna Museet publishes a catalogue presenting Beate Wassermann's oeuvre.

MODERNA MUSEET MALMO

Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö

www.modernamuseet.se

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

Alexander Gutke exhibition, Malmo Konsthall, Sweden

Alexander Gutke 

Malmö Konsthall, Sweden 

17 March - 10 June 2012

ALEXANDER GUTKE works within the conceptual and minimalist tradition. Cameras, film- and slide projectors are some of the main components in his art practice. Gutke uses them to explore space, light, shade, darkness and the infinity of the void. The swedish artist investigates these technical apparatuses as objects and mechanical devices, and uses them as tools and objects in his artworks and narrative – creating a visual illusionism and a poetic and mystical materialism. 

ALEXANDER GUTKE

Exploded View, 2005

Kodak Carousel slide projector, 81 slides, stand 

Courtesy of the artist and Malmö Konsthall

The cameras, 16mm film projectors and photographic devices that interests Gutke are somewhat out of date, but Gutke insists on the value of these 20th century wonders. He both examines and literally dissects these apparatuses and through the process he brings them back to life, to a new life. In 2005 Alexander Gutke produced the poetic work Exploded View, where the viewer visually travels through the inside of a Kodak Carousel slide projector slice by slice or slide by slide – over the course of 81 slides. This inner journey is shown on the same type of Kodak Carousel, whose interior is being explored. Even if the exhibition was sheduled before the Kodak Company news, the exhibition take a special meaning for the 1960s 1970s Kodak products lovers.

Another work that investigates a slide projector and what it does is Lighthouse (2006); here a rectangle of light is slowly rotated 360 degrees slide by slide. The lyricisms of light and the machines are important focal points in Gutke’s artworks. 

ALEXANDER GUTKE

Cine-scope, 2008

Animation HD Video 

Courtesy of the artist and Malmö Konsthall

In other works like the HD video projection Cine-scope (2008) Alexander Gutke investigates the film material itself and takes the viewer on a filmic trompe l'oeil voyage. Stripped from any image or narrative storyline this large-scale projection shows – through real and simulated animated dust, scratches and chafes – the materiality of film and the heart of celluloid; its wear, tears and flaws. 

ALEXANDER GUTKE

Measure, 2011

Laser engraved brass Moebius strip 

Courtesy of the artist and Malmö Konsthall 

Photo © Marcus Schneider, Berlin, 2011 

Alexander Gutke’s exhibition at Malmö Konsthall will present a selection of film, sculpture, photography and rubberstamp works dating back to 2000, side by side with new works created for this exhibition at Malmo Art museum. 

ALEXANDER GUTKE

Subtraktion nr 4, 2008

Ink stamp on paper,

Photo: Sigfrid Carlsson, Bohusläns museum 

Alexander Gutke, born 1971 in Gothenburg, lives and works in Malmö. He graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 2001. 

Malmö Konsthall 

S:t Johannesgatan 7 

SE-200 10 Malmö, Sweden 

www.konsthall.malmo.se