MUSEET- Louisiana (1)

2/2/19

This semester, I am taking European Art in DIS and I get chance to visit many galleries and museums with my class. Plus, I also go visit the museums with my host family and with friends… I am glad to announce that I will try my best to share at least one post about either museum or exhibition I visited every two weeks.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is located on the shore of the Øresund Sound in Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, and 15min driving distance from where I live.

Jakob and I tried to visit two weeks ago, but at then it was the last day of a special exhibition about the moon. We failed to secure a parking spot so decided to try again later. We were quite impressed by the queue of cars waiting on the street and queue of the people walking towards the museum from the train station. Yet, it is the most visited art museum in Denmark, even people from Sweden would drive across the sea to watch the exhibitions.

Cars queue on the street to turn right to the museum

People marching to the museum from the train station

This Saturday (2/2), we attempted again. We were kinda lucky, a car was about to leave when we just got into the parking lot. Quite a few people were in the museum, but at least we can still enjoy the exhibitions.

There are two exhibitions we mainly explored this time. One is Cecily Brown- Where, When, How Often And With Whom, and the other one is Dea Trier Mørch- Into the World.

Cecily Brown

Where, When, How Often And With Whom

British painter Cecily Brown’s art combines figurative and abstract, exuding life, movement, erotic power, and also strong feelings of conflicts and concerns under nowadays society.

I really loved the way of this exhibition displaying paintings and guiding the audience to think about the artworks. I think the whole exhibition is divided into three parts. First, some recent paintings are displayed as a “taste” for the audience, then a short film of the artist talking about the motifs, ideas about her art, followed by some sketches and elements of ideas for people to understand the concepts being discussed in the film, and finally more paintings, including the main work of the exhibition. After exiting the exhibition, the audience returns to the initial start point so the audience can have another chance to look at the most recent paintings of the artist (review the “taste”).

When we first enter the exhibition room, we can see the title of the exhibition and some description texts in the center wall. The wall divides the big room. It is the exit of this exhibition, more paintings are displayed in the area behind the wall. For now, we can only see the preface- two series of untitled artworks on the side walls. Even though the artworks are untitled, we can still interpret or guess the meanings of the paintings. Nudes are colorfully painted, nature is also shown in an abstract way. Almost immediately I saw the style of the painting and the nudes, the name Edgar Degas popped up in my mind.

Even though it is very abstract, we can still see a human figure gets kind trapped in nature, while nature looks very messy

The human figures remind me of the figures painted by Edgar Degas

There’s a pathway in the corner leading to the lower level where we can see more paintings (where the main exhibition starts).

The painting above is one of my favorites.

I think one of my main subjects has always been conflict. Also the dichotomy of good and evil existing in the same place at the same time.
Cecily Brown

This 1997 painting depicts a wild scene of revelry. Brown uses warm color to play up the savage of the revelry. There is also clear contrasts between the brightness with the darkness, between the rabbits putting on the spotlight and the beasts hiding in the dark. We can indeed find the conflicts in this painting, with the conflicts between the good and evil. We can see the rabbits being gang-raped in the beautiful bucolic landscape on a day with sunshine.

The film of artistic talk gave us many insights on her artworks and motifs, as well as the influence under prior painters. Brown talked about her 25 years living in NYC, as a hustle and bustle city style, and that’s partially how she sees and understands the world. Brown uses elements around her, from the magazine, posters, artwork from other masters, and then she put whatever she had on the floor, and let the elements flow into her mind and drew them down for many times to understand the imaginary. As earlier I mentioned that her painting reminded me of Degas’ paintings, and she actually mentioned her inspirations come from Degas and other masters like William Hogarth, Francis Bacon etc.

*Young Spartans Exercising,* Edgar Degas
The national gallery, London

Cecily uses the motives from other sources and she recreated the artwork by putting her own styles and expressions into the artwork. She paints/sketches the same elements over and over again in different settings.