Louisiana Director Poul Erik Tøjner mixes works across the dimensions of genre, size, expression, space and time in this new presentation of the Louisiana Collection shown in the South Wing.
Calder, Viola, Warhol and Wall. Classics that meet contemporary art. New names and newly acquired pieces placed together with well-known ones. A beloved (and slightly feared) pair of spiders. A sculptural brushstroke by Lichtenstein. An extremely heavy glass sculpture by Roni Horn. A cosmic generator by Mika Rottenberg. Ten-meter stripes by Gerhard Richter and a Giacometti no larger than a thumb…
Louisiana’s Director Poul Erik Tøjner has put everything into play and shuffled the deck thoroughly in the physical display of the collection. The pieces are set together in a series of thematic and spatial sequences according to a desire to make possible connections visible and to point to new sensuous relationships. And also to remind us that the museum is a large field of possibilities for experience and thought in which repetition creates something new.
7 thematic parts
The presentation of the collection is divided into seven parts that are based on a concept that Poul Erik Tøjner calls “the wonder of sensuous perception”. The first section, WHO WE ARE, concerns identity, who am I, who are we, who are you? The second, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR, concerns sensory impressions and the sensuous. A WORLD OF DESIGN shows how a large number of artists base their work on the principle that the world is already being organised in images.
NATURE treats the concept of the great landscape together with myths and the dream of mapping. ACTIONS is a small section about the fascination of the independent lives of things, while THE ONE AND THE OTHER concerns a person’s relation to another person, to that which is not me.
The last space – POLITICS – keeps us anchored in the world we have ourselves created before our gaze can free itself in the colossal view of the Sound.
Celebrating the collection
“The collection is the well-known resonating sphere for all the other events to which the museum devotes its space,” writes Poul Erik Tøjner in the article A Feeling for the Collection in the new issue of Louisiana Magazine, adding that the great opportunity with the collection is precisely “to get new eyes to see old material and old eyes to see something new.”
In his considerations about the selection and presentation of the works, Poul Erik Tøjner has naturally kept in mind that 2018 is a special year for Louisiana. “If one is to celebrate a museum’s sixtieth anniversary at all, it must take place with the collection at the centre. For in every sense, it is what remains as the years go by.”
And that is the case even though the collection is regularly shown in varying presentations. At Louisiana, the collection is neither fixed nor permanent – “it is alive – and that is how it should be.”
