With SUNSET BOULEVARD, Ruth Campau transforms the central axis of the Bornholm Art Museum into an interpretation of the cycles of the Sun and life in a progression of movement from the coolness of light to the depths of darkness. The exhibition presents two installations: one, which has the same name as the exhibition, was created for the Art Museum’s biggest space, its central axis. The other, Night Settings, is designed for a small, dark room situated along the same axis in the museum but on a lower floor.

Ruth Campau works on a large scale. SUNSET BOULEVARD is a billowing progression of 192.8 metres of soft, painted lengths of Mylar suspended at a height of 8.7 metres above and along the 36-metre-long space.

Campau has painted the long lengths of Mylar with a broom in a concentrated, powerful process. Body, movement and time transform liquid paint into light, compelling strokes. The distinct traces of her process communicate a powerful human presence in the work.

Painting on Mylar, a type of polyester film, is like painting glazing on canvas. The semi-transparent glazing makes it possible to see what is behind it. Behind the lengths of Mylar in SUNSET BOULEVARD are the light and the sky. The daylight evokes a unique intensity from the colour. And with the light and the vertical axis between the spring (Helligdomskilden) running along the floor and the sky, the work is infused with transcendence, freedom and spirituality.

The space, the light, the spring, and the soft, painted undulations create a progression that reflects on circadian rhythms or the progression of life itself. The movement through the work ends in the second work of the exhibition: Night Settings. This installation anchors Sunset Boulevard by manifesting the contrasts between the two works. Day and night, life and death, conscious and unconscious, active and passive. Yet Night Settings is also a respite that enables a new beginning. The subtler colours of the night emerge in the darkness once your eyes adjust to the dark.

For decades, Campau has approached her pictorial works of art with an abundance of energy in a widened field. Her practice is a field where a conceptual poignancy interacts with the installation’s surroundings to exude a playful fascination with glitter and other post-modern materials.

Her point of departure is international. Her initial formative experiences of art were in California of the mid-1970s where, as a young artist, she encountered installation art and American artists of the post-war years. Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Barnett Newmann, Elsworth Kelly and Jackson Pollock introduced her to large-scale works that allowed the body, the space and the rebelliousness to unfold. Her subsequent encounter with Lee Ufan and the Korean artistic movement, Dansaekhwa, was also a profound source of inspiration. In response to the plight of the Korean people after the Korean War, the movement’s artists developed a style of painting with the capacity to embrace, relieve and calm its beholders for a while.

Ruth Campau (b. 1955) is a pictorial artist. In 2020, she received the Danish Arts Foundation’s Lifelong Honorary Grant for her persistent, comprehensive and continuously investigative artistic endeavours. Campau has exhibited her works at a wide range of solo and collective exhibitions in Denmark and abroad, and she has developed site-specific works for public spaces and institutions. Her works are exhibited at several museums in Denmark. On multiple occasions, the artist has developed architectural ornamentation in cooperation with architectural firms for newly-completed buildings, and she has also curated a number of agenda-setting exhibition projects.

SUNSET BOULEVARD is one several exhibitions that will pave the way for a forthcoming Museum of Light and Art at Bornholm Art Museum. The Museum of Light and Art will present interdisciplinary exhibitions of international calibre. The point of departure for the exhibitions will always be artists who are devoted to exploring art through light. There are many exciting perspectives. The exhibitions of both Campau and Christina Augustesen (Through the Space of Light, presented at the same time in rooms 5 and 6) focus on daylight.

Daylight defines the fundamental living conditions on the Earth: the seasons, biological rhythms, the weather and vegetation. Daylight directly affects our body and mind and has been part of religious ideas through the ages. As many professions are involved with daylight, we have invited an architect, a meteorologist, a dean, a historian of ideas, a chronobiologist and an astrophysicist to see the exhibitions and reflect on how the works of art can inspire the work of their own profession. Their contributions will be published at the exhibition and on the art museum’s website on an ongoing basis.

The exhibition is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Danish Art Workshops