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

Pablo Picasso & Marcel Duchamp, Moderna Museet, Stockholm - Picasso/Duchamp “He was wrong”

Picasso/Duchamp “He was wrong”  

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

25 August, 2012 – 3 March, 2013 

With the exhibition Picasso/Duchamp “He Was Wrong”; the Moderna Museet in Stockholm sets two giants, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, up against each other for the first time. They are often regarded as the two most influential artists of the 20th century – Picasso, who personified the modernist painter, and Duchamp, the indifferent ironist and chess genius, who challenged painting and transformed art into a maze of intellectual amusements. Now, visitors to the Moderna Museet have a unique opportunity to witness this battle of giants and see where it leads.

They may appear incompatible when contrasting the purpose of painting, and the eye versus the mind:

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.” – Pablo Picasso

“I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.” – Marcel Duchamp

Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp are often seen as contraries. And admittedly, although they were often in each other’s immediate surroundings and shared many patrons and collectors, they nevertheless appear to have manoeuvred in totally different worlds. They were so different that their respective ideas on what art should be and can be seem irreconcilable, and yet from their extreme positions they simultaneously exerted incalculable influence on the destiny of modernism. Indeed, the author Octavio Paz once wrote: ‘Perhaps the two painters who have had the greatest influence in this century are Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. The former with his entire oeuvre; the latter with one single work, which is a veritable negation of the modern sense of work.’

The exhibition Picasso/Duchamp “He Was Wrong” represents a passionate confrontation between what are perhaps the greatest of rivals in 20th century art. Reflecting on the resistance each artist felt towards the other is especially meaningful given that 2012 is the centennial anniversary of the first meeting between Picasso and Duchamp. The contrasts between the two artists will be explored, from Picasso’s fascination with the Minotaur to Rrose Selavy, Duchamp’s feminine alter ego. Before Picasso died in 1973, he had noted, with rising resentment, that other artists were challenging his legacy. According to Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, the growing number of young artists who preferred Duchamp was something that Picasso could never reconcile. Richardson writes: “If it had been Matisse, who was always a rival, it wouldn’t have mattered. But who were they looking up to on the other side of the Atlantic but Marcel Duchamp of all people! Picasso despised him.” Allegedly, Picasso’s only comment on hearing that Duchamp had died was: “He was wrong.” Perhaps this is only to be expected, since Duchamp was considered to be the artist who challenged the very foundations of Picasso’s prominence: the eye, the hand, and painting itself.

Picasso/Duchamp: “He Was Wrong” emphasises the rivalry, but also lifts up correspondences, and a proximity between Picasso and Duchamp that has often been virtually ignored. Both artists were promoted in the 1930s by the leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, who also devoted an issue of the journal Minotaure to each of them.

“We are featuring one of the most magnificent and productive rivalries of 20th century art. The most influential painter is juxtaposed for the first time in this way to the artist who has most poignantly challenged painting itself and insisted on other possibilities. This exhibition will be valuable to anyone who sometimes asks what art is and what it can be,” says Daniel Birnbaum, Director of Moderna Museet.

In large measure, Picasso/Duchamp “He Was Wrong” is composed of works by these two artists from the Moderna Museet’s collection. The Museum has one of the world’s most prestigious collections of work by Duchamp, with The Large Glass, La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme (1915-1923), as its centrepiece. It also has a substantial collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by Picasso. Thanks to additional loans, the exhibition covers nearly seven decades of Picasso’s oeuvre.

Two major works from the museum’s collection, Picasso’s Bouteille, Verre et Violon (1912) and Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) are set side by side to highlight the substantial incongruence between each artist’s approach to modernism. Notably, over the course of this exhibition, which opens in 2012 and closes in 2013, these two works of art will pass through their centennial anniversary. It has been 100 years since Picasso and Duchamp first asserted their influence on modern art becoming in Paz’ words, the “greatest influence on our century.”

Moderna Museet’s history is intimately linked to both artists. In 1956, before Moderna Museet was officially opened, Pablo Picasso’s legendary painting Guernica (1937) was exhibited in Stockholm. A few years later, in 1961, Marcel Duchamp visited Stockholm and providing crucial inspiration for a new generation of artists and numerous exhibitions that followed on at Moderna Museet. The upcoming exhibition is greatly enhanced by works borrowed from museums and private collections in Sweden, Denmark, France and Switzerland.

An illustrated catalogue with new essays by Daniel Birnbaum and Ronald Jones will be published in conjunction with the exhibition. The catalogue is published in association with Verlag Walther König, Cologne.

Curators: Daniel Birnbaum, Ronald Jones and Annika Gunnarsson.

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

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

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

6 June – 16 September 2012

YOKO ONO is a pioneer of conceptualism and the international Fluxus movement, and has been sharing her message of peace and love with the world for nearly 60 years. The Moderna Museet exhibition highlights Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit from 1964 and features selected instruction pieces that encourage new, imaginative ways of looking at life and creating art. For the exhibition Yoko Ono has made a new piece called Summer Dream and a new instruction piece, that some 20 artists have been invited to respond to. Moreover, Yoko Ono will realise two of her works together with the public on Djurgården in Stockholm during the full-moon night between 4 and 5 June.

Grapefruit is a seminal collection of texts, so-called instruction pieces, and has been reprinted in many editions since 1964.

“I named my first book of instructions with the name of the fruit I loved. Grapefruit is a hybrid of orange and lemon and to me, it represented East and West, the two cultures in my life which gave the instructions the power of the Universe. Have fun with it.” Yoko Ono

In the 1950s, Yoko Ono had already begun experimenting in the borderland between music, performance, poetry and visual art. She used the concert and event formats as a place where the audience was encouraged to enact her ideas, or simply to think and develop them in their own minds. With a background in classical music composition and studies in philosophy, Yoko Ono began writing “scores” for art, that is, instructions that could be interpreted again and again by audiences and colleagues. In each new context, new expressions and nuances arise, depending on who is doing it and where. Yoko Ono’s practice is therefore a unique prelude to conceptualism, which emerged in the 1960s. In an era of radical change, artists were eschewing the notion that art was primarily physical objects to be produced and consumed. They challenged the traditional art concept and began working with ideas, sounds, actions and time as artistic materials. Language became a key element.

“Grapefruit is undoubtedly one of the world’s ten best artist’s books. It has everything – humour, poetry and breathtaking, inspiring ideas. With her experimental films and instruction pieces, Yoko Ono is a unique voice in 1960s avant-garde art. And as a woman and conceptual artist, she is a strong role model for a new generation of artists”, says Cecilia Widenheim, curator of the exhibition.

One of Yoko Ono’s most famous instructions is Cut Piece from 1964, which the artist herself has performed on several occasions. The enacted situation consists of Yoko Ono sitting on a stage before an audience, with a pair of scissors in front of her, inviting the audience to cut pieces from her clothing. Filmed documentations of Cut Piece, from 1965 and 2003 and several of Yoko Ono’s legendary Fluxfilms will be shown in the exhibition at Moderna Museet. Yoko Ono’s films have a unique position in 1960s experimental film-making. Several of them are based on instructions published in Grapefruit – for instance, the film No. 1 (Match), which is based on the text Lighting Piece from autumn 1955: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.”

For the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Yoko Ono has written a new instruction, Search for the Fountain. The text has been sent to some 20 artists who have been invited to respond to the text in various ways. Search for the Fountain is a distinct example of how Yoko Ono intentionally lets the materialisation of her artistic ideas lie open to interpretation, but also how she assumes that viewers will handle and reinterpret the concept from their own perspectives. Among the participating artists are VALIE EXPORT, Tris Vonna-Michell, Julieta Aranda, Simone Forti and Emily Roysdon. 

Curator: Cecilia Widenheim

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Sturtevant: Image over Image, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Sturtevant: Image over Image

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

17 March – 26 August 2012

Clone, doppelgänger, reflection? Sturtevant is one of the great enigmas of the art scene. For half a century she has challenged the meaning of art and what it entails to be an artist. Her legendary repetitions of works by Warhol, Duchamp, Beuys and others were groundbreaking, and her work continues to be exceedingly poignant in our digital era of abundance, copies, clones and increasingly complex issues concerning commodities and copyright.

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image at Moderna Museet allows her oeuvre to display its full range. The presence of Sturtevant’s works becomes nearly site-specific in six of the 18 rooms that are usually dedicated to the permanent collection. The artists whose works she has repeated largely overlap with the history of Moderna Museet and its unique collection of Marcel Duchamp, American pop art and minimalism. Moderna Museet also has a history of confronting authenticity – from important replicas to the project Museum of the Fakes which was shown within the exhibition She – A Cathedral in 1966, and the now internationally infamous Brillo boxes. Curator of the exhibition Fredrik Liew says:

“Sturtevant is a pioneer who, at the age of 82, is at the height of her career. She was ridiculed when she made her debut in 1965, and no one at the time made the links between her work and a critical discussion of surface, product, copyright and autonomy. Nor did anyone consider what it could mean that a woman artist was repeating the works of male colleagues. But then, her repetitions came before Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Millet and Greer had published their seminal works on these subjects.”

Since 2000, Sturtevant has made several video installations in which she combines mass media images with her own filmed material in a collage-like format. These works emphasise how her oeuvre extends beyond the internal affairs of the art scene. Sturtevant’s harsh and critical gaze is aimed at a lazy society that is increasingly made up of superficiality and experience industry. As Sturtevant herself comments:

“What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that’s the way to go.”

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image features 30 works, including her repetitions of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Félix González-Torres, and four of her most recent major video installations. The artist has produced no less than four works specifically for this exhibition – among them a series of repetitions of Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow in the Moderna Museet collection.

Sturtevant was awarded the Golden Lion for her lifetime achievement in art at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

A richly-illustrated catalogue in English and Swedish will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition, and is published jointly by Moderna Museet, JRP Ringier and Kunsthalle Zürich. It is designed by Johanna Lewengard, and contains essays by Fredrik Liew, Daniel Birnbaum, Stéphanie Moisdon, Bruce Hainley and Paul McCarthy.

The exhibition Sturtevant: Image over Image is produced by Moderna Museet in collaboration with Kunsthalle Zürich where it will be on display 17.11 2012 – 20.1 2013.

Curator: Fredrik Liew

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Siri Derkert at Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Siri Derkert
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
28 May – 4 September, 2011

Siri Derkert is one of Sweden’s most prominent artists. Her oeuvre spans from early cubism to monumental works for public spaces. In this generous retrospective, Moderna Museet presents the entire compass of Siri Derkert’s art and gives insights into her personal life and political commitment to feminism, environmentalism and peace, issues that are as relevant today as they were then, for her generation.

Siri Derkert (1888–1973) was a major presence in 20th century Sweden, and several decades have passed since her artistic production was shown on a larger scale. The first major retrospective of a living artist at Moderna Museet took place in 1960 and featured Siri Derkert, who was 72 at the time. She was also nominated to represent Sweden in 1962 at the newly inaugurated Nordic Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia. Now, half a century later, Moderna Museet presents a generous retrospective that includes her early works, her cubist paintings, fashion drawings from the 1910s, profound child portraits and life studies, drawings and later works in concrete, strip iron and clay. Siri Derkert’s early cubist paintings belong to international modernism, while her later work for the Östermalmstorg underground station (1965) in Stockholm marked a radical change in the notion of public embellishment.

“Her background in the Parisian avant-garde of the 1910s, her continuous artistic work spanning two world wars, and her impact on political and artistic modernity in Sweden in the 1960s, make her a unique 20th century figure. She has also become something of a legend or icon. Siri Derkert was a popular and regular guest in the early days of TV, and occurred frequently in the press and on radio. She was a major public policy maker and a strong voice in political debates,” says Annika Öhrner, curator of the exhibition.

Siri Derkert’s fierce commitment to the causes of feminism, peace and environmentalism is reflected in many of her works and in what she said and wrote, making her one of Sweden’s most well-known and popular artists. This exhibition also documents the personal side of Siri Derkert, with photographs, films and recordings from radio broadcasts and interviews.

A comprehensive and richly illustrated catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, with recent essays by art historians on Siri Derkert’s cubist art, her political notes and her art for public spaces. Moreover, the Swedish National Library’s research project on Siri Derkert’s archives will be publishing an anthology, Att alltid göra och tänka det olika. Siri Derkert i 1900-talet (To Always Do and Think the Different. Siri Derkert in the 20th Century) in June. The Library will also present a display and online exhibition featuring documents from the archive.

MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM
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

Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Tate Liverpool, 2011-2012

Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings 

This exhibition will be on view this year and in 2012 at:

Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 8 October 2011 - 15 January 2012
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 11 February 2012 - 28 May 2012
Tate Liverpool, 22 June - 28 October 2012

CY TWONBLY

Untitled 2007

© Cy Twombly. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever 

JMW Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly are three of the greatest painters of the last 150 years. In the autumn of 2011, Moderna Museet will bring together a groundbreaking exhibition focusing on later works by the three artists. The exhibition Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings, curated by JEREMY LEWISON , is organized by MODERNA MUSEET and will tour to Germany and the UK in 2012. 

J. M. W. TURNER (1775-1851) was one of the most innovative painters of the Romantic era, whose works Monet admired on his stay in London in 1871 and challenged in his later depictions of London and Venice. CY TWOMBLY (b 1928) has also had a lifelong interest in Turner and in the last twenty years has demonstrated a strong affinity for the work of CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) the founder of French Impressionism. The exhibition Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings is an unique opportunity to see these three important artists together and what unites them. 

"All three artists have been considered radical in their time and met with negative comment when pushing the boundaries of the conventions of painting. Their late work has a looseness and an intensity that comes from the confidence of age, when notions of finish and completion are modified", says Jeremy Lewison, curator of the exhibition, formerly Director of Collections at Tate and now working as an independent curator. 

Turner, Monet, Twombly: Later Paintings is an exhibition that examines each artist in some depth, and will introduce their work in new ways to both new audiences and to those already familiar with the artists’ work. The exhibition features more than 60 works, and will examine not only the art historical links and affinities between the painters, but also the common characteristics of and motivations underlying their late style. It highlights modernity and classicism in the work of all three artists, characteristics that will emerge by their unique juxtaposition in this exhibition. In their later phases the three artists are not only preoccupied by mortality and memory but retain an interest in the Romantic outlook and the sublime. 

Works by Turner will mainly be drawn from Tate’s Turner Bequest and works by Monet and Twombly will be drawn from museums and private collections across the world. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in three language editions, with an in-depth essay by Jeremy Lewison and graphic design by Patric Leo. 

Curator: Jeremy Lewison 

Assistant Curator: Jo Widoff 

MODERNA MUSEET

http://www.modernamuseet.se

Jeanloup Sieff, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Jeanloup Sieff

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

19 February – 22 May 2011

The French photographer Jeanloup Sieff (1933–2000) is a legend in fashion photography and one of the most prominent photographers of his generation. Moderna Museet in Stockholm presents the first Nordic solo exhibition of Jeanloup Sieff.

Jeanloup Sieff began photographing in the early 1950s, as a contemporary of Helmut Newton and David Bailey, belonging to the generation succeeding Irving Penn. In the course of a long career, his photography spanned from fashion, advertising and portraits to reportage and landscapes. His images are often sensual and elegant, and in the 1960s he was much in demand as a fashion photographer, especially in the USA, where he lived for some years in New York. As a respected fashion photographer, Sieff had assignments for magazines such as Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour and Jardin des Modes. Sieff also engaged in commercial photography, including promotion campaigns for Chanel and Revlon and the first Yves Saint Laurent fragrance.

”In his fashion and advertising photographs the models are characteristically close to the pictorial surface, an effect achieved by using a wide-angle lens. His working method was based on physical and emotional closeness. This lack of distance makes his images exciting and visually interesting,” says Anna Tellgren, curator.

In the course of his career, Jeanloup Sieff took several now classic portraits of prominent fashion icons, including Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Jane Birkin. French cultural celebrities such as François Truffaut, Catherine Deneuve and Serge Gainsbourg have also been portrayed by Sieff. Several of these portraits will be featured in the exhibition at Moderna Museet. Jeanloup Sieff was deeply fascinated by dance, another of his frequent subjects. He got to know Rudolf Nureyev just after he had defected to the West, and collaborated with the American dancer and choreographer Carolyn Carlson. The exhibition at Moderna Museet presents a selection of 53 pictures from Sieff’s photographic oeuvre, with an emphasis on his dance photography.

“He was interested in the dancers as artists, and the actual struggle during rehearsal to get their bodies to perform more or less impossible movements.

His dance photographs are fascinating because they really convey the smell of sweat and the shuffling sound of dance shoes, which is exactly what he was after,” Anna Tellgren continues.

Curator: Anna Tellgren

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Eva Löfdahl, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Eva Löfdahl

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

5 February – 1 May 2011

EVA LOFDAHL (b 1953) is one of Sweden’s most important contemporary artists. Since her debut, more than three decades ago, she has created varieties of paradoxical metaphors, challenging our habitual way of seeing things, in the form of sculptures, objects, paintings and drawings shown in exhibitions, or works made specifically for a particular public site. The Moderna Museet shows Eva Löfdahls’ works in a major exhibition.

The exhibition at Moderna Museet is a retrospective, and yet exceedingly contemporary. Eva Löfdahl has created a comprehensive new work, an installation where tentacles, antennae and building modules branch out into a spatial structure incorporating earlier works. The installation is a site in itself and incorporates several temporal levels with varying content. Low-energy and dynamics. Universal and applied models. Development and proto-states.

Her observations of a variety of conditions are materialised in work categories such as souls, homes, war monuments and emblems. Her choice of material is primarily a choice of work method to formulate content. Eva Löfdahl has an unerring ability to express the enigmatic in permanent works. She is inscrutable yet perfectly straight-forward.

EVA LOFDAHL, born in Gothenburg in 1953, currently lives and works in Stockholm.

She has studied at the College of Arts in Stockholm and at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. During the early 1980s Eva Löfdahl received attention for the first time, then as part of Walldagruppen with Max Book and Stig Sjölund.

She has participated in a number of landmark exhibitions over the years and in 1995, Eva Löfdahl was the Swedish representative in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Eva Löfdahl is represented in museum collections in Gothenburg, Malmö, Norrköping, Uppsala and at the Moderna Museet.

A richly illustrated catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition, with essays by Jo Applin, art historian, Catharina Gabrielsson, architectural theorist, and the exhibition curator Ann-Sofi Noring, Moderna Museet. Graphic design by Anders Ljungman.

Curator: Ann-Sofi Noring

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Mary Kelly, Moderna Museet, Stockholm - Four Works in Dialogue 1973-2010

Mary Kelly 

Four Works in Dialogue 1973-2010 

Moderna Museet, Stockholm 

16 October, 2010 – 23 January, 2011 

MARY KELLY’s work holds a seminal place in the history of contemporary art. She is best known for her large-scale installations that pose challenging questions about identity, sexuality and memory in relation to individual and collective history. Moderna Museet shows some of her most influential works, together with a new piece produced for the exhibition in Stockholm.

Four Works in Dialogue comprises Post-Partum Document (1973-79) and related work Primapara, The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (2001), Multi-Story House (2007) and the recent piece Habitus (2010). Part V of Mary Kelly’s groundbreaking work Post-Partum Document was acquired for the Moderna Museet collection in the course of the project “The Second Museum of Our Wishes”, and in this exhibition, the complete work is being presented in Sweden for the first time.

Mary Kelly’s works are imbued with a profound interest in material process as well as language and history. Her works are a unique blend of subtly humorous personal narrative and critical analysis, often in dialogue with the women’s movement of the 1970s. Over the years, Mary Kelly’s practice has come to be a vital inspiration and reference point for many younger artists.

By showing Mary Kelly’s major projects from the 1970s together with works from the past decade, the exhibition seeks to engage us in a visual dialogue across generations that have been shaped by different cultural circumstances, but subject to the same historical events. The works in the exhibition capture the diverse voices that form our archive of collective memories, reflecting on the way past hopes and disappointments reappear in the present, and alluding to the formative role of the mother-child relationship in that process.

Mary Kelly’s groundbreaking Post-Partum Document was created over a period of six years. Documenting her son’s gradual mastery of language in the first few years of life, Kelly shows that it is a mutual process of socialisation, affecting both mother and child.

Multi-Story House is part of a larger installation, Love Songs, which visualizes Mary Kelly’s dialogue with younger women about the legacy of feminism. The walls and ceiling are constructed of plexi panels that display short anecdotal narratives about feminism. Some are the voices of Mary Kelly’s contemporaries, others, her students, but all share a common interest in the history of the women’s movement and how it has been challenged and renegotiated. Multi-Story House was created in collaboration with Ray Barrie for documenta 12 in Kassel.

In The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi the artist looks at the way language impacts the assumption of national or ethnic identity. Mary Kelly’s prose is based on a newspaper report in Los Angeles Times about the fate of an infant boy during the Balkan war in the 1990s, and describes how a fortuitous event was used by the media as a symbol of Kosovo’s fight for independence.

Habitus was created by Mary Kelly, in collaboration with Ray Barrie, for this exhibition at Moderna Museet. The structure’s shape and size are based on the Anderson Shelter, which was mass produced for home use in Britain during the Second World War. In Habitus the corrugated iron is replaced with panels of laser-cut text that become legible when they are reflected in the mirrored floor. Mary Kelly’s short, quirky narratives recount the memories of a generation born during or after the war began, marked by violent events such as the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, or the ethnic conflict in Serbia.

 In addition to the four major projects, Moderna Museet will also be showing the film Nightcleaners (1972–75) by The Berwick Street Film Collective. Nightcleaners is a 90-minute, black and white film, which documents the lives of women who clean London offices at night and take care of children and household chores during the day. Originally intended to be used in a campaign to organise women cleaners in the Transport and General Workers Union, it developed into an influential experimental film that challenged the documentary genre.

Curator: Cecilia Widenheim

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Keren Cytter, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Keren Cytter

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

8 May – 15 August 2010

KEREN CYTTER has rapidly established herself internationally as one of the most interesting and unique artists on the contemporary art scene. At the mere age of 33 (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, currently living and working in Berlin), in the last eight years she has produced more than 50 video works, written three novels and an opera libretto, started the dance and theatre company D.I.E. Now, won awards and is the darling of the art press. Last summer, she exhibited at the New Museum’s group show Younger Than Jesus and participated in the Venice Biennale. Keren Cytter says: “I studied art because I wanted to go to New York and wash dishes.” (Art Review, April 2009)

Moderna Museet’s exhibition of Keren Cytter is her first in a Nordic art institution. A selection of the artist’s best films and several drawings will be featured, including a new suite made especially for the exhibition, along with text-based works.

Keren Cytter’s topics often include love stories, violence, sex and murder. She applies a non-linear narrative, the stories often shot with a hand-held camera. The actors – amateurs and friends of the artist, but more recently professional actors – switch roles with each other, or read their stage directions out loud. Scenes are repeated, but with a different course of events, with voiceovers or alternative dialogues. The films are usually set in simply-furnished apartments, especially the kitchen regions, suggesting a connection to kitchen sink realism. The literary tone of the dialogue, however, is far from realistic, writes Magnus af Petersens in the catalogue, adding:

“Instead the films are deliberate hybrids between seemingly incompatible genres, between home videos and auteur films in the spirit of the French nouvelle vague, between Dogme and docu-soap or sitcom. But her films are above all existential dramas about the human condition, about love and hate in our thoroughly medialised age.”

Curator: Magnus af Petersens

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se

Anthony McCall, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Moderna Museet Now: Anthony McCall 

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

10 October – 6 December, 2009

Beginning in the 1970s, Anthony McCall creates art based on the beam of the film projector in the darkened cinema, working on the boundary between the most influential styles and genres in postwar art – minimalism, film, performance and drawing. In this exhibition, Moderna Museet presents two of his large light installations from the 2000s, along with numerous drawings.

“Anthony McCall was part of a circle that included many of the seminal artists of the 1960s – Richard Serra, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Snow and Joseph Kosuth, to name but a few – and addressed many of the issues they were dealing with, albeit in his own independent and idiosyncratic way. It is exciting now, to present this exhibition of McCall, following his wonderful comeback that started with the Whitney Biennial in 2004,” says Lars Nittve, Director of Moderna Museet and curator of Moderna Museet Now: Anthony McCall.

In 1973, Anthony McCall embarked on making the now legendary film series Solid Light. The first part, Line Describing a Cone, had its first screening at the experimental art space Fylkingen in Stockholm on 30 August the same year. During half an hour, a narrow ray of light was projected through the room by a 16 mm projector, first forming an arch and ultimately cutting out a large cone of light in the dark room.

This is basically the same sensual experience we may encounter today when we move in darkness through McCall’s luminous walls or membranes of light. But now they are sculpted using different technology, to achieve greater visuality and complexity, both in animation and projection. Suddenly it has become possible – now that smoky and dusty lofts are a thing of the past – to (re)create the filmic “fog” necessary for the light to materialise with the aid of a haze machine.

It was when Anthony McCall discovered this possibility that he decided to return to art, after a pause of nearly 25 years, making his acclaimed comeback at the Whitney Biennial in 2004 with an entirely new work, Doubling Back. This work, which was recently acquired for the Moderna Museet collection and is featured in the exhibition, initiated the second chapter in an oeuvre that has come to assume a central position in art at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Anthony McCall was born in 1946 in the UK, but moved to New York when he was in his 30s. Since resuming his artistic work, he has participated in a large number of international solo and group exhibitions, at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the Serpentine Gallery, to name but a few.

At the finissage, the last weekend of the exhibition, 4–6 December, Line Describing a Cone, 1973, will be shown in the right-hand gallery on Floor 2.

Curator: Lars Nittve with Jo Widoff

Moderna Museet Now is an exhibition series for contemporary art and historically interesting oeuvres, comprising some four exhibitions per year.

MODERNA MUSEET

Exercisplan 4, 111 49 Stockholm

www.modernamuseet.se