Denise Grünstein: En face

Transcription

1 Denise Grünstein: En face Stockholm 19 February 3 May 2015 Magnus Olausson Director of Collections and Research Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm Volume 22

2 Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, is published with generous support from the Friends of the Nationalmuseum. Nationalmuseum collaborates with Svenska Dagbladet and Grand Hôtel Stockholm. We would also like to thank FCB Fältman & Malmén. Cover Illustration Anne Vallayer ( ), Portrait of a Violinist, Oil on canvas, 116 x 96 cm. Purchase: The Wiros Fund. Nationalmuseum, NM Publisher Berndt Arell, Director General Editor Janna Herder Editorial Committee Janna Herder, Linda Hinners, Merit Laine, Lena Munther, Magnus Olausson, Martin Olin, Maria Perers and Lidia Westerberg Olofsson Photographs Nationalmuseum Photographic Studio/ Linn Ahlgren, Bodil Beckman, Erik Cornelius, Anna Danielsson, Cecilia Heisser, Per-Åke Persson and Hans Thorwid Picture Editor Rikard Nordström Photo Credits Samlungen der Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Fig. 5, p. 15) Museum Bredius The Hague (Fig. 6, p. 16) The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo/Jacques Lathion (Fig. 2, p. 23) Kalmar läns museum, Kalmar/Rolf Lind (Fig. 3, p. 27) Stockholms Auktionsverk, Stockholm (Fig. 5, p. 35) Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels (Fig. 2, p. 38) Teylers Museum, Haarlem (Fig. 3, p. 39) Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Shelfmark: Riserva.S.81(int.2) (Fig. 2, p. 42) Galerie Tarantino, Paris (Figs. 3 4, p. 43) Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain (Figs. 3 4, pp ) National Library of Sweden, Stockholm (Figs. 5 6, pp ) Uppsala Auktionskammare, Uppsala (Fig. 1, p. 51) Landsarkivet, Gothenburg/Johan Pihlgren (Fig. 3, p. 55) Västergötlands museum, Skara (Fig. 4, p. 55) Svensk Form Design Archive/Centre for Business History (Fig. 2, p. 58) Svenskt Tenn Archive and Collection, Stockholm (Fig. 4, p. 60) Denise Grünstein (Fig. 5, p. 152) The National Gallery, London (Figs. 1 3, 6 7, 17, pp , , 179) The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo/Jarre Anne Hansteen, CC-BY-NC (Fig. 8, p. 174) Nicholas Penny (Figs. 9 10, 12 14, 16, pp. 175, 177, 179) Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala (Fig. 11, p. 176) Getty Museum CC-BY. Digital image courtesy of the Gettys Open Content Program (Fig. 15, p. 178) The Swedish Royal Court/Håkan Lind (Fig. 9, p. 188) Eva-Lena Bergström (Figs. 1, 3 4, 6 7, 9, pp , , 198) Statens Museum for Kunst/National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, CC-PD (Fig. 2, p. 193) The Nordic Museum, Stockholm/Karolina Kristensson (Fig. 5, p. 195) Graphic Design BIGG Layout Agneta Bervokk Translation and Language Editing Gabriella Berggren, Erika Milburn and Martin Naylor Publishing Janna Herder (Editor) and Ingrid Lindell (Publications Manager) Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum is published annually and contains articles on the history and theory of art relating to the collections of the Nationalmuseum. Nationalmuseum Box SE Stockholm, Sweden Nationalmuseum, the authors and the owners of the reproduced works ISSN Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 22, 2015

3 exhibitions/denise grünstein: en face Denise Grünstein: En face Stockholm 19 February 3 May 2015 Magnus Olausson Director of Collections and Research Fig. 1 Interior from the exhibition Denise Grünstein: En face. The Nationalmuseum is no stranger to contemporary art. Our collections and our exhibition activities both bear witness to the Museum s focus on art from our own era. The experience of closely monitoring the birth of a new art project 1866 was new to us, however. The project was incorporated with the exhibition Denise Grünstein: En face (Fig. 1). The project is based in the Nationalmuseum the Leibovitz of the Swedish welfare state. In the late 1990s, however, she lost interest in these portrait commissions, finding faces too easy and predictable. She was also losing patience with the pretensions of her models. Instead, Denise Grünstein decided to develop her artistic practice by engaging in her own art projects. This has made her one of the leading figures of staged photography. Grünstein succeeds in forever resite where it was staged and performed by an artist whose portraits were already in our collection. Denise Grünstein (b. 1950) has worked for many years as a commercial photographer, specialising in fashion and portraits. She is known for her celebrity portraits in the magazines Månadsjournalen and Elle in the 1980s and onwards, which is partly how she earned the moniker the Annie 149 Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 22, 2015

4 exhibitions/denise grünstein: en face Fig. 2 Denise Grünstein (b. 1950), Zone V, 1998, in the exhibition Denise Grünstein: En face. generating her art, trying new, unexpected solutions and challenging the boundaries of photography. The dramaturgy in her images is infused by avant-garde fashion photography, with its fictional narratives, and episodes with neither beginning nor end. Her photographic works are replete with historic references to both painting and early photography. She has taken inspiration from 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century Surrealism. In her staged images, Grünstein often evokes a strange world, blending beauty with a sense of dissonance. As an artist, she deals with existential issues, without proposing any answers. She is meticulous on a conceptual level in arranging her images, and is equally thorough when it comes to the actual craft, with an emphasis on the materiality of photography. She still uses a large-format camera but processes her pictures digitally. Denise Grünstein s art project 1866 was shown in the middle room and was the newly-produced part of the exhibition En face. It originated in an idea for a portraitbased retrospective exhibition. The Na- achieving a retrospective character through the use of the old museum building as a stage or sounding board. Grünstein chose to include allusions to her previous works, such as the archive, or the ghost-like festive architecture in Zone V (1998) (Fig. 2). Still, she had never before worked as systematically with interiors, but mainly used outdoor settings. The vast, secretive, virtually empty museum halls intrude on us. It would have been counterproductive if she had opted to fill the space with old worn office chairs, ladders or packing crates. Instead, Grünstein arranged her own accessories in the rooms and cabinets miniature trees, fruits, curtains, and, of course, figures possible and impossible bodies. The totality forms a tribute to art, but it is also a stage in Grünstein s own artistic journey. Size is a fundamental element that Denise Grünstein experiments with in As in the building models of architects, she has used miniature versions of trees. Juxtaposed with these are her images of monumental halls in the old museum building. The format is not merely crucial to undertional Swedish Portrait Gallery has several of her finest portraits, but Grünstein soon lost the urge to create an exhibition on the theme of portraits. When all the art, furniture and other fittings were removed from the Nationalmuseum in early 2014, she went to see the empty building. This visit affected her profoundly and immediately generated a stream of visual ideas. The result was the series called 1866, referring to the year the Museum was inaugurated. But the images themselves cannot be dated, it is impossible to say for sure if they are from the past, the present or the future. As an artist, Denise Grünstein intentionally plays with these ambiguities and leaves the viewer oscillating between two extremes that we can never reach and which are each other s opposites the past and the future. In the project 1866, Grünstein revisited various themes that she had worked on earlier, but using the empty museum premises as a backdrop to her imagery. This is what made Grünstein s project, in direct partnership with the Nationalmuseum, such a remarkable sequence, Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 22,

5 exhibitions/denise grünstein: en face standing the proportions in the pictorial space, but also has bearings on the artistic dramaturgy. It is, at one and the same time, a reproduction and a construction. A large format, thus, supplies the tools for understanding the work of art, but also gives rise to an ambiguity, where the sheer size ultimately erases the boundary between the depicted space and the space from which it is viewed. Denise Grünstein has worked with colour photography for many years. Throughout the post-war era, this had been synonymous with commercial photography, whereas black and white was reserved for artistic ambitions. But this distinction has long since ceased to exist. In the 1866 project, Grünstein opted for a combination of polychromatic and monochrome photography (Fig. 4). Light is closely related to colour. It is incredibly important in Denise Grünstein s practice. She is a master in this field and prefers to work with natural light. She has also skilfully used the reflections from the surface of the water, which the original architect Friedrich August Stüler had calculated would throw light all through the central staircase of the building. With a distinct reference to her romantic portrayal of Queen Silvia (Fig. 3) the photographer has in one of the images in 1866 (Fig. 5) conjured up a ghostly apparition with a bright aura descending the main staircase. In other pictures, she shows a woman in a dress resembling a crinoline pass through the building, which was constructed in the 1860s. The impression that this is a landscape from the past is enhanced by the red veils or grey films that Grünstein has used in her project. Her images from the old museum premises seem to depict her own dreams, which dwell in all dimensions of time historic, present and future. A total of 55 works were shown in the exhibition, including two videos. One of the latter was part of the 1866 project, along with 18 new photos. The retrospective part of the exhibition was presented in the two galleries on either side, and featu- Fig. 3 Denise Grünstein (b. 1950), Silvia, (b. 1943), Queen of Sweden, Drottningholm Palace, Gelatin silver print, 60 x 60 cm. Nationalmuseum, Swedish National Portrait Gallery, NMGrh Fig. 4 Interior from the exhibition Denise Grünstein: En face. 151 Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 22, 2015

6 exhi b i t i o n s/d e n i se g r ü n st e i n : e n fac e Fig. 5 Denise Grünstein (b. 1950), Descending, Gelatin silver print, 80 x 102 cm. Artist s collection. red a number of items selected from previous photographic series, including Figure in Landscape (2001), Malplacé (2005), Figure Out (2009), Acute Still Life (2011), Winter (2013) and Wunder (2013). Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Volume 22, 2015 Exhibition curators: Magnus Olausson in collaboration with Denise Grünstein Exhibition design: Joakim Werning Lighting design: Gert-Ove Wågstam Exhibition technology and installation: The Technical Department of Nationalmuseum under the supervision of Thomas Lundgren Chief conservator: Karin Wretstrand Exhibition coordinator: Matilda Sandelin Education officer: Helena Sjödin Landon 152 Exhibition catalogue (in a combined Swedish and English edition): Denise Grünstein: En face (vol. I); 1866 (vol. II) Nationalmuseum exhibition catalogue no. 673 Editorial committee: Eva-Lena Karlsson, Ingrid Lindell and Magnus Olausson Translation: Gabriella Berggren Graphic design: Greger Ulf Nilson ISBN