Your Rainbow Panorama

It is soooo beautiful!!! Today, I visited ARoS and had a go with Olafur Eliasson's magnificent installation called Your Rainbow Panorama.

I was very excited to try it. It consists of many glass windows spanding the colour circle and gives you a view of Aarhus in all the diffenrent colours. Under the panorama circle, there's a platform or terrace where you can sit and relax. I believe this area is supposed to be included ARoS' restaurant which is just down stairs sometime in the future.

I can definately recommend this experience. You get a special time ticket for half an hour that you may stay in the rainbow when you buy the regular tickets to the museum. (the rainbow-tickets don't cost extra) Maybe this will change when the early "madness" wears off, but it was sufficient time for me and I stayed there the whole time.

The project cost about 62 million DKr, about £6,2 million, and I think they are worth it! The overall storyline in ARoS is now complete. The museum is build on Dante's Devine Comedy and tells the story of Heaven (Your Rainbow Panorama) and Hell (The Nine Rooms), and everything in between.

From outside, it looks as though the museum now has a multi-coloured halo floating over it's roof, as you can see on the first photo from yesterday.

I bet this work will be quite exquisite in the sunset and on a sunny winter's day when the colours reflect down into the snow. I'm going to visit this a lot! And all the children I saw seemed to think it was awesome, so it's very children friendly.

ARoS Aarhus Museum of Art

All photos are mine.

Anticipating Rainbows

Aarhus has finally got it's Rainbow, at the roof top of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Olafur Elliason's Your Rainbow Panorama has opened. I have yet to visit and see for myself but all the people I have talked to say that it is AMAZING!

So naturally, I have dreamed of rainbows and wanted to share a little collection of my homely rainbows I came across..

All images are my works, including the painting.

Museum Details

Here's some pictures of some of my favourite things at ARoS Aarhus Museum of Art. I like walking around the pretty paintings and sculptures, and I always start at the top with The Golden Age in Danish art and work my way down to the special exhibitions and The Nine Rooms. Later this year, there's going to open a special installation on top of the building created by Olafur Elliason called Your Rainbow Panorama and I'm very exited about it. From outside its very beautiful but I'll tell you about it in details when its done and I've visited.

For now, I'll just show you these..

Detail.

By Eckesberg, considered to be the founding father of The Danish Golden Age in painting.

Detail from a much larger painting of a Danish rural wedding in the 19th C. I love the bonnets..

The rural paintings were very popular in Denmark in the 19th C, however, they were all idealized versions of the happy but ignorant peasant. It was not until late 1880s and 1890s that socialist themes began to merge into these paintings.

Detail of a young girl's folk dress. In real life, this detail is about 15 cm and I'm always strusk by the amount of detail in her lace bonnet and shawl.

Painting by Anna Ancher, one of the Skagen Painters and Denmark's main figure in Impressionism. No one else in Denmark was that influenced by the movement.

Girl with blue Ribbon - by a French painter whose name I don't remember.

Painting by Wilhelm Hammershøi. The most famous of his paintings is localised in Randers Art Museum, north of Aarhus.

I like the clash between the very elaborate gilded phrame and the expressive style of the painting.

Maison d'Elephant by John Kørner (DK). He was one of the invited artists who decorated the royal apartments at Amalienborg Castle to the Crown Prince Couple together with Kathrine Ærtebjerg and others.

Detail of a much larger painting by Michael Kvium.

Painting by Eske Kath, also one of the artists from Amalienborg Castle.

So, there you go. A little visual history of art at Aarhus Museum of Art from around 1770 to present. I haven't included pictures from The Nine Rooms due to them being more installations or video montages and should be experinced live in order to give the best presentation.

ARoS  Frederik VIII's Palace (Amalienborg Castle)

A Ghost Who Walks

I have always loved sculptures for their grace and the much clearer sense of craftmanship than I do with paintings and other art forms. Don't know why really, but there you go. It the same thing with architecture, even if I don't really feel anything for the overall design I get flushed with wonder if I start to think of the workmanship and the actual building the houses etcetera.

On Aros Aarhus Museum of Art, Danish-German sculptur Christian Lemmerz showed a marvelous and very dark exhibition of works playing on the traditional notions of what sculptures should and could do as representative and decoration and working as well as contemporary comments to the world around us. The show was titled 'Ghost' and it was set in an all black setting with spotlights on the scultures. The sculptures were either in Italian marble, plastic or some sort of papmache (as far as I could tell - this may not be true though, I rarely read the labels for anything else but the titles.) Very gloomy and provoking if all you have been introduced to before is like the long stately galleries with busts and decorative sculptures like at the Versailles. This was nothing like that!

 Detail of 'Abu Ghraib'

 'Abu Ghraib'

 detail of the sculpture pair above

 The slightly coloured stuff you can see inside the plast sculpture look anatomically like lungs and were attached to some sort of respirator and therefore the sculpture was breathing. Very scarry actually, to see 'life' in a dead thing beacuse we tend to distinguish so sharply between breathing equals living and the reverse. I also had connotations to a hospital ward with patients hooked up on these machines and only 'living' because of them. I still can't decide whether I like that or not.

 A huge drawing called 'Dante's Dream'. A comment or illustration of how Lemmerz pictures (literally) Hell in Dante's work.

To give a sense of the scale of the drawing, and the 'entrance' zone to the dark covered rooms where most of his marble sculptures were displayed.

Overall, I found it a very beautiful yet haunting show, and some of the works, especially 'Abu Ghraib' was very hard on me emotionally. I would actually have loved to look more closely at it but I could literally feel my eyes tearing up! Thank god for the darkness, I say! However, Christian Lemmerz will definately be an artist who I will keep an eye on - if only for the amazing techniques and craftmanship he demonstrated here.

Aros on 'Ghost' in English