Lenke Rothman, Life as Cloth, Malmö Konsthall
Lenke Rothman (1929–2008) passed away sixteen years ago, but her work feels completely relevant today. She came to Sweden as a Hungarian-Jewish refugee in 1945, having survived two concentration camps. The exhibition at Malmö Konsthall was full of pain and darkness, but also healing and hope. It included textile assemblages, often scraps in various patterns, sometimes also with found everyday objects joined together with needle and thread. The stitches are reminiscent of scars, but there is also something light and playful in the approach, a tribute to the beauty of the everyday.
Firelei Báez, Trust Memory Over History, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Painting has always been a central concern at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition of Firelei Báez, born in 1981 in the Dominican Republic, featured mainly large-scale paintings, but also installations and groups of smaller works on paper. The big paintings – often featuring hybrids of people, birds, and plants in bright colours, shimmering blues, greens, and reds – are sometimes painted on old maps. Wonderful hairdos, underwater worlds, violence, and beauty – the works were seductively beautiful, but also menacing. Like Ellen Gallagher, Báez draws inspiration from the myths of Afrofuturism.
Agnes Denes, Exercises in Eco-Logic, Lund Konsthall
The images of Agnes Denes’s warm yellow wheatfield against a blue sky and Manhattan skyscrapers, just two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Centre, are iconic. It’s both incomprehensible and hopeful that Denes managed to complete this work on nearly two acres of what must have been some of the world’s most expensive land, at the very heart of international capitalism. Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – Cloudy Sky (1982) is a classic work of Land Art, as well as a relational work involving planting and harvesting. But above all, it is an environmentalist activist project with a unusual visual power that resounds to this day.
Magnus af Petersens is a freelance curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs at the investment fund Arte Collectum. He was previously chief curator of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and director of Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm. This spring he is curating a solo exhibition with Karin Alfredsson at the Nobel Prize Museum and, with Ashik Zaman, an exhibition of abstract painting at Konstnärshuset, both in Stockholm.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
