Life in Abu Dhabi: Moderna Museet Stockholm

Linnea and I returned to Sweden this week, straight into Stockholm with Emirates after getting bumped day after day off the Copenhagen flight with Etihad.
It was actually not such a bad thing (even though we had to fly Economy...), because we were heading up there anyway. Linnea was going to stay with the twins on Ekerö for a few days, and I was going to catch up with Erika.

Last summer we visited a bunch of museums, both Etnografiska Museet, Östasiatiska Museet and Medelhavsmuseet - but we ran out of steam and only saw the outside of Moderna Museet. So this year, that's where we started!

The Moderna Museet art collection is rather vast, it comprises of more than 130,000 works, including 6,000 paintings and more than 100,000 photographs. This means that only a part of the collection can be on display at any chosen moment, with constant changes in the narrative of the exhibition.

We started with the 'The Third Hand' exhibition, by Italian Maurizio Cattelan. He had used artworks and pieces from the Moderna Museet Collection in dialogue with his own, to question the conventions of society - in general and in the art world in particular.

This is Tableau tir (1961) by Niki de Saint Phalle. It was created by the artists pulling the trigger of a loaded gun on her work, causing bags and cans of paint explode and making the art works almost bleed, like human beings.The act could be seen as performance art. Niki de Saint Phalle was the only woman to be included in the Nouveau Réalisme group in the early 1960s, together with among others Yves Klein, Christo and Jean Tinguely.

I really liked the central room in this exhibition, where the artist had created a sort of a square. The walls were hung with paintings that are usually mounted on pull-out screens in the depository of the museum, installed in the same way as in storage where aesthetic and ideological principles are put away for more practical considerations. No hierarchy here.

By presenting artworks randomly selected, and pieces normally not shown, Cattelan challenge the power that a museum exerts through its choices.
In the middle of the room there was a full-sized copy of the monumental sculpture L.O.V.E (2010). The original can be found in Milan.

The presence of pigeons all throughout this exhibition, emphasized the feeling of no borders, outdoors and indoors seemed to be merged together. The stuffed pigeons - Ghosts (2021) - were observing us as we moved from room to room.

In this room, we could also enjoy a series by Cecilia Edelfalk, called Elevator (1998). The same image painted in different formats and in a variety of styles. The motif was inspired by a spiritual experience Edelfalk had at a museum in Tuscany, where she suddenly saw an angel pointing at her.

We also enjoyed the 'Pink Sails' exhibition, which explored artists in the Swedish Modernism movement, art from 1900 to the 1940s.
Here a sculpture by Sven X-et Erixson from 1933 called The Sculpture (A portrait of Bror Hjorth).

A very famous painting, The Dying Dandy (1918) by Nils Dardel. Great to see it live, as we studied it in my art history course.

Another painting to the right by Dardel, and two paintings by Fernand Léger, an artist we present also at the Louvre Abu Dhabi at the moment.

View of Slussen (1919) by Sigrid Hjertén, another favourite of mine:

The final exhibition was called 'Seven Rooms and a Garden', and was created by American artist and filmmaker Rashid Johnson. His work was in conversation and sometimes even in confrontation with the artworks from the collection of Moderna Museet.

In all the works of this exhibition, Johnson explored the gesture of abstraction as an art historical lineage, a necessity, and a personal appeal.

I was happy to also get to enjoy some other very famous pieces, like these two, by Man Ray - Indestructible object 1923/1965 - and surrealist Méret Oppenheim.
My Nurse (1936/37) is one of my favourite pieces: