CAN ART UNITE THE WORLD? Experimental Art from WWII until Today

From July 10th 2024

As the Second World War rages across Europe, very few people travel outside Denmark. Many artists look inward, and new artistic milieus flourish in different parts of the country. On Bornholm, landscape and figure painting are cultivated with renewed interest.

Painter Claus Johansen believes that nature and art are critical contrasts to the busy lives of many people. “If only people paid more attention to nature, they’d be better at appreciating art. But most of them are so busy...”

Community and experiments become the focal point of art after the Second World War.

As a reaction to the Holocaust and the accelerating era of mass communication, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba begins to develop humanistic sculptures: “I believe that I’m beginning to see what sculpture means to me with greater clarity. It has become my only means of breathing and staying on my feet in a world where the air has become so infected and foul-smelling from the crimes that we are ashamed to pass on to our children.”

In recent decades, artists are preoccupied by nature in different ways.

Global processes of change resulting in global financial crises are drawn into the conceptual space of art. Artists use concepts such as critique of the class-based society, humour, care and caring, grief, observations and personification to understand the life of nature.

Silas Inoue works with what we cannot see with the naked eye: “The creation of the mould fungus works evolved from a genuine fascination with some of the trends that characterised abstract painting in the early 2010s. The works depict a type of eternal change.”

This exhibition shows works by Oluf Høst, Niels Lergaard, Olga Lau, Anna Klindt Sørensen, Hans Peter Haagensen, Sigurd Vasegaard, Olaf Rude, Claus Johansen, Asger Jorn, Gudrun Henningsen, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Tonning Rasmussen, Niels Macholm, Pipin Henderson, Jørgen Haugen Sørensen, Margit Rosenmeier, Søren Kjærsgaard, Anne Sofie Meldgaard, Inger Sif Heeschen, Silas Inoue, Pernille Braun, Christian Finne, Nicolai Howalt, Trine Søndergaard, Gerner Jancke, Inge Lise Westman, Eva Brandt, Christina Augustesen og Emil Westman Hertz.