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Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art to open in a new guise

Photo: Johan Persson
Photo: Johan Persson

On Saturday 28 January, after extensive renovation work, Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art in Lund, Sweden, will open its doors once again.

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The inauguration will coincide with the opening of four temporary exhibitions of contemporary artists and architects: Swoon, Charlotte von Poehl, Andreas Eriksson and Elding Oscarson.

‟Now is when the exciting work begins. The renovation has created completely new conditions for the museum’s interaction with wider society”, says museum director Patrick Amsellem.

Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art is a unique art museum focusing on the artistic creative process. It contains the world’s largest collection of sketches, models and designs for Swedish and international public art. The museum, founded in 1934, is part of Lund University, and consists of connected buildings from six different periods. It features sketches from international artists such as Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, Henry Moore and Fernand Léger and one of Europe’s foremost collections of sketches by Mexican monumental painters such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

The works range from a rapidly scribbled pencil sketch or copper mesh models only a few centimetres tall, to plaster sculptures five metres high and, in certain cases, even completed works. In connection with the reopening, the permanent exhibitions have been re-designed to highlight the collections.

‟The renovation is about increasing accessibility. An important part of this extensive work has been the digitalisation of over 30 000 items in the unique collection”, says Patrick Amsellem.

Saturday at Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art will start with a jubilee ceremony to mark Lund University’s 350th anniversary, with invited guests including King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia visiting the museum. At 16:00, the museum will open its doors to the public. The inauguration evening will mark the premiere of Skissernas Night, the first in a series of eventful evenings at the museum. The premiere will feature performances by artists from near and far: Cave Dogs, Lur and Raindear. On Sunday, there will be a creative workshop in which participants, together with Swoon, will create a paper artwork inspired by the artist’s own work. Charlotte von Poehl will present her exhibition.

The American artist Swoon, whose real name is Caledonia Curry, started as a street artist in the industrial quarters of Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 1990s. For this exhibition, Swoon has created a large location-specific mural based on meetings with refugees in Malmö in 2016. Her meetings with a young Syrian woman and an unaccompanied youth from Afghanistan form the basis of the exhibition and both are depicted in the artwork, Haven. Their powerful story inspired Swoon to invite them both to take part in a story-telling project which was realised by Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art in 2016–17 and will be presented at the museum on 2 February at 19:00.
 


 

In recent years, Paris-based artist Charlotte von Poehl has made frequent visits to Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art to study sketches, artists’ letters and archive material. Her notes from these visits form the basis of The Notepiece, which can be described as a poetic investigation into the museum’s genesis and history. The exhibition also presents her new work Kristaller (Crystals) for the first time, with more than 500 different crystals from old chandeliers hanging together like a light-refracting cloud in the museum’s window gallery facing the park. Von Poehl has also produced a textile work for the exhibition.

For two years, one of Sweden’s best known artists, Andreas Eriksson, worked on his huge painting for the main entrance of the new hospital, Nya Karolinska Solna. Here, twenty small paintings in acrylic on canvas, produced at the same time as the large work, are exhibited. Visitors can also listen to an interview in which the artist talks about the commission and see a selection of the many photographs that Eriksson took as he created the work, in order to document the artistic process before it was concealed in the completed painting.

The fourth exhibition displays architectural models produced by Elding Oscarson, the architects who won the 2014 competition for the new extension of Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art including a restaurant and atrium. The spectacular meeting room was added later, created out of a former inner courtyard in the middle of the museum building. The short film with the first sketches for the museum extension reveals the architects’ attempts to find the right design for the museum’s new buildings. The ideas were then tested in three-dimensional architectural models which are also on display.

‟The four exhibitions connect in various ways to the museum’s core: creative processes and our public spaces”, concludes Patrick Amsellem.

The extensive renovation was enabled by generous contributions from sponsors and donors.

High resolution press images are available here

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