WHAT'S ON 2016

WHAT’S ON 2016 OP ART, BOURGEOIS, NEW VIDEO & CONTEMPORARY ART, PICASSO, GERNES, DANIEL RICHTER...

The exhibition includes an example of Kusama’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton and the installation Mirror Room (Pumpkin), 1991 (Hara Museum). Photos: Kim Hansen and Poul Buchard.

YAYOI KUSAMA Japanese Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is world famous for her brilliantly coloured patterns that cover the surfaces of paintings and sculptures and involve whole spaces with walls, floors and ceilings covered by soft forms and dots in stark contrasts. Amidst this unending flow stands Kusama herself, in photographs, often dressed in clothes in the same pattern as the pictures. Louisiana’s exhibition ‘Yayoi Kusama – In Infinity’ tells the story of an unusual artistic life full of dreams and images that are continually glowing out into the world and becoming objects and spaces.

The exhibition presents works from Kusama’s almost 60-year career, across the many artistic media she has expressed herself in: painting, sculpture, performance, film, literature, installations, fashion and design.

For the exhibition we have succeeded in finding works and material that have rarely or never before been outside Japan, including loans from Kusama’s personal collection and archives.

UNTIL 24 JANUARY

David Altmejd, The Flux and the Puddle, 2014. Mixed media. Collection Giverny Capital, long term loan to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Photo © Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY.

DAVID ALTMEJD With the work The Flux and the Puddle (2014) the Canadian artist David Altmejd (b. 1974) has created one of the most fascinating works of the past decade in sculpture and installation. The work is one large spatial narrative enclosed in a gigantic display case. From different angles it can look like a cosmological model, a scientific collection of objects or an abandoned stage set for a theatre production or a film. The Flux and the Puddle is a model world, both frightening and fascinating, that makes us think of all the systems we must relate to in the digital, technological ecosystem of our life today. The almost 50 square metre display landscape contains figures and formations in materials including wax, mirrors, plaster, acrylic paint, latex, feathers, ceramics, ink, wood and quartz. The Flux and the Puddle is a quite extraordinary experience and is the first exhibition in a new series, Louisiana One Work, each of which will focus on a single striking work by a contemporary artist.

UNTIL 31 JANUARY

Candice Breitz in front of her video installation Working Class Hero (A portrait of John Lennon).

The work from 2008 was acquired for Louisiana with funding from the Augustinus Foundation.

FIRE UNDER SNOW NEW VIDEO ART AT LOUISIANA Louisiana has an ambitious acquisitions policy and every year, with the generous aid of foundations and private donors, adds new artworks to the collection. In 2016 Louisiana turns a special focus on the collection with two major exhibitions presenting the new acquisitions of the past three years with a main emphasis on contemporary art. The first exhibition, Fire Under Snow, will be a fascinating encounter with video works and films by the best contemporary artists in the genre, including Darren Almond, Adrian Paci, John Bock, Candice Breitz, Rineke Dijkstra and Ed Atkins.

The new works are supplemented by a number of video classics from Louisiana’s collection, and the East Wing of the museum will become a grand tour of the moving pictures and stories about people, history and society, visions and the future. It will be spectacular, intimate, mysterious, amusing, moving, reflective...

21 JANUARY – 8 MAY

Bridget Riley, Movement in Squares, 1961. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © 2011 Bridget Riley. Courtesy: Karsten Schubert. Victor Vasarely, Tridim TT, 1969. Louisiana.

EYE ATTACK OP ART 1950-1970 The images of art may be about the world around us, but may also be quite specifically about the eyes that see – our eyes. The Op Art of the 1950s and 1960s is the artists’ take on the connections between the world and our senses, particularly revolving around illusion and the unreliability of sensory perception. The Op Art movement was inspired by the technological awakening of the epoch, by psychology and neurophysiology, and its dynamic visual world has later extended into digital design and modern aesthetics. With around 100 works by more than 40 artists the exhibition is the first major presentation of Op Art and Kinetic Art in Scandinavia for more than 50 years. Although Op Art was closely tied to its own time, its results are surprisingly timeless.

Its assault on the eye is unabated – and is effective today with its mixture of instant fascination and nostalgia.

4 FEBRUARY – 5 JUNE

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #132, 1984, C-print. Acquired with support from the Augustinus Foundation. Alex Da Corte, installation, 2014. Acquired with support from Museumsfonden.​

ILLUMINATION NEW CONTEMPORARY ART ‘Illumination’ is a cornucopia of international contemporary art and modern classics. It presents painting, photography, sculpture and installations, all acquired for Louisiana over the past three years.

The more than fifty works are clear proof of Louisiana’s ambitious goals for the acquisition of contemporary art; it keeps the museum alive and creates surprising, eye-opening perspectives on our time. Illumination offers in-depth insight into the art of the present within a wide field of familiar and less familiar artists of the global art scene: from Andreas Gursky, Franz West, Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra and Julie Mehretu to names like Sterling Ruby, Alex Da Corte, Roni Horn and Tacita Dean. The exhibition culminates in an art festival in the spring, featuring several of the exhibiting artists.

3 MARCH – 11 SEPTEMBER

Taryn Simon: Exploding Warhead, Test Area C-80C, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, 2007. © Taryn Simon. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

TARYN SIMON LOUISIANA ONE WORK An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is what Taryn Simon has called her portraits of American society – a series of photographs of places that are normally inaccessible to the general public. Behind each picture are years of research, culminating in a single photograph.

Together the pictures uncover the hidden structures that are concealed beneath the surface in the national culture of the USA and are integrated in the foundations, mythology and everyday functioning of the country.

The subjects have been taken from areas like science, religion, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and politics. They include an issue of Playboy Magazine in Braille; the cage in which a prisoner on Death Row can move around outdoors; an inbred albino tiger; and a living HIV virus.

Taryn Simon uncovers the hidden places of the USA like a spy, but is driven by the collector’s fascination with the rare or curious.

31 MARCH – 19 JUNE

Summer classics: Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental Figures in Landscape from 1977 (Permanent loan from Museumsfonden) and Martial Raysse’s Souviens-toi de Tahiti from 1963.

CLASSICS AT LOUISIANA Louisiana’s collection of modern and contemporary art is both a foundation for the activities of the museum and a sounding-board for the actual exhibition programme. The collection is a dynamic entity that not only continues to grow but in fact moves around in the house, where it forms part of selected presentations throughout the Louisiana year.

This is necessary to make room for the changing exhibitions, but at the same time provides opportunities to show the individual works in new ways and in other constellations. The collection thus becomes more alive, while the museum’s many faithful visitors always have chances to discover and rediscover its new as well as its more familiar sides.

So it will undoubtedly be popular when a selection of the collection’s great, classic works and names – including Lichtenstein, Warhol, Picasso, Hockney, Kiefer and Yves Klein – hold a ‘rendezvous’ in the West Wing of the museum in a gratifying summer reunion.

16 JUNE – 21 AUGUST

Poul Gernes, The Dream Ship, 1968. Mixed media installation, on long term loan to the Sorø Museum of Art / Photo: Leá Nielsen. Portrait of Poul Gernes: Åge Sørensen / Scanpix.

POUL GERNES Poul Gernes (1925-1996) is one of the truly great Danish artists of the post-war generation, known widely for his large public decorations.

Gernes came from the Constructivist tradition – politically as well as artistically – and at the beginning of the 1960s was a pivotal figure in the Eks-Skole, the group of avant-gardists who with a single blow dominated not only their own time, but the subsequent writing of art history with new methods, new materials and a new conception of the role of art and artists in society. Louisiana’s big summer exhibition features a number of Gernes’ major works and focuses on his unusual talent for creating large, impactful images addressed to a new, optimistic age as well as his rigorously experimental practice. In keeping with the reorientation of the 1960s, art had to come down off the easel and not look like ‘works of art’ in the standard sense, and others than the artist could easily execute them. Or in Gernes’ own words: I cannot do it alone – want to join in?

2 JUNE – 23 OCTOBER

Pablo Picasso, Figures on the street, Barcelona, 1898. Pencil, ink and watercolours on paper. Gift from Pablo Picasso, 1970. Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

PICASSO BEFORE PICASSO Picasso was a formidable, inspired practitioner of the art of drawing – before he became ‘Picasso’. “At the age of fourteen I could draw like Raphael,” he liked to say. And he was right – and more than right. For the interesting and fascinating thing is not only that he was technically skilled as a boy and a young man, but also that he shows a human maturity that is revealed by his ability to observe people and life as it was lived. Every drawing from his hand is evidence not only of what was to come, but also of a rare, supreme empathy. This Louisiana on Paper exhibition of 25 of Picasso’s earliest drawings takes its point of departure in the collections at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and shows the birth of the genius through examples that contain the seeds of the Picasso who left his mark on most of the history of art in the first half of the twentieth century.

30 JUNE – 11 SEPTEMBER

Daniel Richter, Halli Galli Polly, 2004. Oil on canvas. Photo: Mischa Nawrata, Sammlung Essl Klosterneuburg/Wien. Study for The Surprising Comeback of Dr. Freud, 2005. Louisiana.

DANIEL RICHTER The German artist Daniel Richter (b. 1962) is regarded as one of the most important artists of a generation, which also includes Peter Doig and Tal R. Richter arrived on the art scene in the 1990s with an expressive abstract formal idiom, but since the turn of the century has exclusively painted figuratively. Richter himself describes it as a new kind of history painting, although the specific historical event has gone, for he seeks rather to capture a particular current historical spirit marked by the death of the great political utopias. Richter’s paintings are related both thematically and formally to German Expressionism and painters like Max Beckmann and George Grosz, who in the years before World War II painted acerbic, humorous and profoundly socially critical, allegorical pictures.

Daniel Richter takes a similar strong approach to painting and Louisiana’s exhibition shows his development from the earliest efforts until today.

8 SEPTEMBER – 8 JANUARY 2017

Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXVI, 2003. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag & Cell (The Last Climb), 2008.

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photos: Christopher Burke / © The Easton Foundation.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) has achieved a status as one of the most prominent and influential artists of the twentieth century. She is a central figure in the Louisiana collection, not least with Spider Couple, the large sculpture from 2003. It was in that year that Louisiana first presented Bourgeois in a retrospective exhibition; and now comes Structures of Existence: The Cells, which concentrates on another of her most original work types, the cells. The term cell plays on all the meanings of the word, from prison cell to monk’s cell to the smallest biological units of the body. Each work is an independent spatial unit full of carefully arranged objects which create sensory and psychologically tense scenarios.

The exhibition occupies the whole of the South Wing of the museum with around 25 cells as well as a selection of smaller sculptures, paintings and drawings. The exhibition has been organized by Haus der Kunst in Munich in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Louisiana.

OCTOBER – FEBRUARY 2017

Louisiana Live is a lively forum for debate and discussion where the interaction between the guests, hosts and the audience is of major importance.

LOUISIANA LIVE The entertaining and thought-provoking cultural debate that takes place in LIVE has been a regular part of Louisiana’s program since 2008, when the museum introduced its evening hours – Tuesday to Friday until 22:00. In fact these generous opening hours have enabled Louisiana to re-emerge as the cultural center it was intended to be when it opened almost 60 years ago. An energetic and lively place full of knowledge and opinions, a place where artists, scientists and thinkers meet with the public in a live format. Throughout the year, Marie Tetzlaff of the Politiken daily newspaper and Marc-Christoph Wagner – journalist, correspondent and part of the Louisiana Channel team – each host a series of exciting meetings with leading cultural figures of the day. Registration is advised for these popular LIVE events, but otherwise they are free and require only a ticket to the museum.

—

The Louisiana 2016 concert programcomprises a.o. performances by the internationally acclaimed soloists Emmanuel Pahud and Lise Berthaud. Photo: © Thomas Ernst.

CONCERTS & MUSIC For many years, Louisiana has served as a haven for international musicians who specialize in chamber music. It has therefore been possible to create a special relationship of trust and belonging that the museum’s concert guests enjoy and is now also reflected on the Louisiana Music site. Louisiana Music presents classical music in new ways and from new perspectives by using the latest film technology. These classical music videos are a natural extension of the museum’s high-profile concert program, and they lift the special interplay between Louisiana and world-class musicians so that it reaches beyond the museum’s concert hall and is accessible to everyone. For further listening please visit music.louisiana.dk

—

Louisiana Literature takes place on different locations inside the museum as well as outside on the Park Scene. The atmosphere during the festival days is fantastic. Photo: Klaus Holsting.

LOUISIANA LITERATURE Louisiana’s literature festival debuted in 2010 and was a resounding success. It has now become a recurring event that every year brings together over 40 writers from Denmark and abroad and several thousand visitors during the four festival days. Louisiana Literature has welcomed international writers such as Margaret Atwood, Herta Müller, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jonathan Safran Foer. The festival atmosphere is absolutely fantastic, and most of the museum is involved in a lively interplay when the authors move in with readings, performances, interviews and discussions. With this program, Louisiana not only brings an old legacy – a strong commitment to the world of literature – into a new era; the museum also hopes to strike a blow for good literature and the necessity of it. In 2016, Louisiana Literature will be held 18-21 August.

—

The three-storey Louisiana Children’s Wing is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00–18:00, though the workshops close down at 17:30.

THE CHILDREN’S WING Louisiana is one of the few places in the museum world where children have their own quarters – not to mention a full three storeys. Since opening more than 20 years ago the wing has served as a vibrant and inspiring refuge for several generations of children and young people who have been able to use their senses and imagination and have got an eventful and completely natural introduction to the world of art. During the week and on weekends, the Children’s Wing is the setting for a wide variety of activities, including open workshops that are related to both current exhibitions and works in the permanent collection. Special workshop activities and offers for small children, somewhat older ones and families are on the program during school holidays, and several times a year the staff of the Children’s Wing’s holds Visual Arts Schools and Workshops, where children and adults have the time and opportunity to experiment with artistic techniques, expression and materials.

—

Louisiana Learning offers free guided tours Tuesday to Friday, either in the current exhibitions or in the permanent collection. Photo: Ulrik Jantzen.

LOUISIANA LEARNING Louisiana Learning offers everything from guided tours and school visits to a mobile guide and international collaborations. It encompasses the museum’s expansive and steadily growing offers of presentations and instruction. Louisiana Learning’s arts facilitators perform the free guided tours that are offered Tuesday to Friday – tours in English can be ordered by contacting the museum. Louisiana Learning also arranges and customizes many courses and teaching materials for schools, secondary schools, teaching seminaries and other educational institutions. The program also includes a wide range of initiatives that emphasize immersion and creative interaction – from Art+Evenings at the museum to the Art Exchange program, which arranges exchanges for both students and teachers with the Tate museums in London. Another important international collaboration is the ongoing art project for refugee children organized together with the Danish Red Cross.

—

On Louisiana Channel, you can meet notable artists, architects, musicians and designers and learn about their working methods, sources of inspiration and ideas.

LOUISIANA CHANNEL Since its launch in 2012, Louisiana Channel has become a wide-ranging Internet channel with around 1.7 million page views a year. This is where you can meet the personalities and trends setting their stamp on the global cultural scene – on your computer, tablet or mobile phone.

Louisiana Channel should be seen as a strong contribution to the ongoing development of the museum as a cultural platform and as an expression of desire to sharpen the understanding of the importance of art and culture. The material is found in the museum’s unique network, but Louisiana Channel also looks beyond the museum’s own context and seeks out stories where the artists are. New videos – on the visual arts, literature, design and architecture – are posted on the site every week, and you can currently experience more than 300 inspiring meetings with artists by visiting channel.louisiana.dk.

—

In 2016 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is generously supported by:

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Gl. Strandvej 13 DK-3050 Humlebæk +45 4919 0719 mail@louisiana.dk Opening hours Tuesday-Friday: 11-22 Saturday-Sunday: 11-18 Public Holidays: 11-18 Mondays: closed

Tickets Adult (from 18 years): DKK 115 Student with student ID: DKK 110 Children & young people: free Groups (min. 15 pers.): Adult: DKK 105 / Student: DKK 95 when paying together Louisiana member: Free entry Member’s guest: DKK 95

Front page: Bridget Riley, Blaze 4, 1964. Emulsion on board. Private Collection © Bridget Riley 2015. Picasso drawing: © Succession Picasso/copydanbilleder.dk 2015. Louise Bourgeois images: © The Easton Foundation. VAGA, NY/copydanbilleder.dk 2015

—

A favourite spot for all ages and all year round, Louisiana is often hailed as “one of the most beautiful museums in the world.” Photo: Kim Hansen.

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Louisiana is a leading international museum of modern art with an acclaimed exhibition program focusing on modern and contemporary art, architecture, photo and design. It is also a vibrant centre of culture – a dynamic framework for concerts, literature, lectures, conferences and encounters with artists. Louisiana is located just 35 km north of Copenhagen and surrounded by a sculpture park with a panoramic view of the Øresund strait. The museum’s collection of post-war art is one of the most significant in Scandinavia. Rooted in the low-key modernism of the 1950s, the architectural design of Louisiana is considered a unique achievement that fits gracefully and intimately into the landscape.

Altogether, this is an extraordinary place that strikes a rare balance between art, architecture and nature: a place of true beauty all year round. Note the generous opening hours Tuesday-Friday until 22:00.

For more info visit our website in English: en.louisiana.dk

—