Rock My Soul II, Eva Livijn’s home, Stockholm
It’s strange to visit a large private residence on Östermalm in my professional capacity, and to step behind a velvet curtain into the owner’s bedroom. Even stranger to encounter Zanele Muholi’s gaze in a gigantic self-portrait above the well-made bed, while noticing a work by Frida Orupabo on the floor. From parlour to toilet, the rooms were filled with art from the African diaspora. With her enthusiasm, Eva Livijn had drawn the artist Isaac Julian to her home to recreate the exhibition he had curated for the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, but with the addition of Swedish artists.
Anselm Kiefer, Essence – Eksistence, Artipelag, Gustavsberg
Anselm Kiefer’s monumental approach and endless harping on about the German nation’s original sin, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust over and over again for decades of gigantomaniacal creativity can be tiresome. That was sort of how I reasoned before the artist’s first major exhibition in Sweden. But I was wrong. The magnificence worked. The desolate, grey landscapes, the Paul Celan quotes, the Kabbalah mysticism, and the gruesome little tin warships that sail along a bleak coast of ridged layers of impasto paint: everything was charged with such energy and pathos that I surrendered unconditionally.
Matisse – The Red Studio, National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), Copenhagen
What elegant eye candy and art-historical detective work this small, delicious exhibition was, with Matisse’s L’atelier rouge (The red studio) at the centre. This painting from 1911 is of a studio interior where the artist has sketched in the works that happened to be there at the time. The curators traced them all – apart from one that had been destroyed – and arranged them around the room in approximately the same places as in the red studio. The painting’s delicious Venetian red is actually applied over an earlier underlying version of which only thin lines suggesting walls and furniture are still discernible.
Clemens Poellinger is a long-standing staff member at Svenska Dagbladet’s arts pages and is responsible for the newspaper’s visual arts coverage. Together with the critic Ulrika Stahre, he produces the podcast I själva verket.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
