WAX - Sensation in Contemporary Sculpture

Feb 5th 2011 - May 15th 2011

Our newly renovated building provides the framework for this large-scale international exhibition, scrutinising the sensual and breathtaking wax sculpture. The exhibition will bring together 16 rising and acknowledged contemporary artists who within the last decades all have contributed to the strategy of the wax sculptural praxis. The participating artist are: Vanessa Beecroft (I/US), Hilary Berseth (US), Maurizio Cattelan (I/US), Michael Elmgreen (DK/D) and Ingar Dragset (NO/D), Robert Gober (US), Emil Westman Hertz (DK), John Isaacs (UK/D), Oleg Kulik (UA/RUS), Christian Lemmerz (D/DK), Kirsten Ortwed (DK/D), Anne Schneider (A), Gavin Turk (UK), Brigitte Waldach (D), Andro Wekua (GE/CH) and Yangjiang Group (CN).

Horror, humour, fear and fascination are all reactions which the works of wax in this exhibition induce. The sculptures reflect experiments with sensing, immediacy and dialogue. In the light of this new sensory praxis, the exhibition will, in a compelling and thought-provoking way, produce new experiences of wax as a sculptural material and media for depicting the important issues of our time.

The artworks in the exhibition are grouped according to their cognitive similarities. The themes are: Performing the Iconic, On the Edge of Being, Sensation in WAX, Body Horror, and the works are created within the last couple of decades, emphasizing the last 10 years. Four artworks are created specifically for the exhibition by Christian Lemmerz, Andro Wekua, Emil Westman Hertz and Jacob Kirkegaard. The wax artworks of the exhibitions have a varying expression, from superrealism, where the sculpture has a surprisingly lifelike presence, to the abstract and minimalistic, where the focal point is the immediate expression of the artwork in relation to the senses of the spectator. Common to all the works in the exhibition is a critical reflection on the historical genres, motifs and expressions of sculptural praxis.

Subsequently the exhibition will be shown at KUNSTEN, Museum og Modern Art, Aalborg.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS - Mother and Child

Feb 5th 2011 - May 15th 2011

”You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the inbetween is trust and love.” (Bourgeois, 1987). At this exhibition we focus on one of life’s central themes: motherhood. Mother & Child is Louise Bourgeois’ celebration of motherhood, from fertility to the special bond which exist between mother and child during the pregnancy, the birth and the child’s life.

Louise Bourgeois’ was preoccupied with the existential and worked and interpretated this her whole life. She influenced the 20th Century’s dominating art movements from surrealism in the 1930s to the installation art of the 1990s. The exhibition Mother & Child is with other words a meeting with one of the most impressive profiles of our time.
Bourgeois’ cv encompasses the most respected and high profiled museums and art institutions around the world, and at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND we are honoured to present Bourgeois in Copenhagen.

The French-American artist Bourgeois has through her long life created one of the most spectacular and personal artworks within modern art. She died in the Spring 2010, 98 years of age and we are pleased to be able to celebrate her and her work with this exhibition of her late works.

The works in the exhibition, which include gouache and sculpture, are highly delicate and poetic but also very strong, embracing the universal topic of motherhood for a broad public audience. The intense red colour of the gouache works in many different nuances gives the motifs warmth and life, and makes the works extraordinarily vivid.

The exhibition is created in close collaboration with Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Sweden and The Louise Bourgeois Estate.

KIRSTINE ROEPSTORFF - STORIES

26th sept. 2010 - 25th. sept. 2011

THE MEETING ROOM is a special place in Kunstforeningen GL STRAND. It's art, it's an installation, it's design and it's the framework for a meeting. In The Meeting Room the meeting is spatially center-stage. Changing artists and designers challenge the influences the spatial framework have on meetings between people.

Kirstine Roepstorff is one the Danish artists that is about to break through internationally. She is famous for working with appropriations where images of mass media are reused in a new and surprising context, often in spectacular, vivid and colourful setups in a great number of different materials. In the project: STORIES in GL STRAND she adapts her work, and creatively rethinks the spatial layout of a meeting room.

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