Concrete
09.01 – 26.01 1997
CONCRETE is Malmö: geological, cultural, industrial, economic, political; here lie memories and traditions… for generations, the concrete industry has been a major part of the population’s work and livelihood… here exists knowledge and experience, but not yet of concrete as an artistic material. The exhibition CONCRETE contributed that knowledge and experience.
Three of the most internationally acclaimed artists met in Malmö: Miroslaw Balka, Antony Gormley, and Anish Kapoor—to work with this rawest of materials.
MIROSLAW BALKA, who previously participated in the exhibition Till Brancusi, which marked the reopening of Malmö Konsthall in the spring of 1994, is currently represented by a memorial in Stockholm commemorating the Estonia disaster. He always bases his art on the measurements of his own body and created an impenetrable House of Childhood for the CONCRETE exhibition.
ANTONY GORMLEY, we remember from his exhibition at the art hall in 1993. A dominant part then was the installation with 40,000 small clay figures in a large field. As a follow-up to this impressive work, the artist planned a “colony” of precisely measured Malmö residents forming a landscape of human architecture—a concrete suburb where each individual is their own house.
ANISH KAPOOR used the art hall’s flexible architecture in a very surprising way, offering visitors a breathtaking experience where, as always, he questioned our trust in the senses. Two empty spaces that we were invited to fill with our own experiences.
