Lars Kleen – Hem

Lars Kleen’s exhibition Hem (Home) at Malmö Konsthall in 1989 was a large-scale, immersive sculptural experience. At the center of the installation stood the monumental Väggen (The Wall) – a massive, handcrafted structure that had taken three years to complete in Kleen’s workshop. The construction was shaped as much by engineering as by artistic intuition, evoking both a sense of shelter and confinement – a physical barrier that could be seen as both a wave and a wall.

The exhibition Hem explored the concept of home through its most fundamental elements, presented as a series of oversized objects: a wall, a chair, a table, a staircase, a bed, a hearth, and a window. Fragments of a home, yet distorted and displaced. The wall buckled as if about to collapse, the spiral staircase eroded into a trap, the table hovered weightlessly in the room, and the bed – a site for love, birth, and death – bore the marks of fire. One of the quieter yet perhaps most poignant pieces was a window, where tree branches forced their way through a broken pane – a striking image of nature’s relentless reclamation of what humanity has abandoned.

A few years earlier, Kleen had constructed a city of façades in the Sundbyberg subway station – a lost place seemingly sinking into the rock. In a similar way, Hem functioned as a vision of the familiar, yet shaken from its foundations. Over months of intense labor in his workshop in the old linseed oil factory in Danviken, surrounded by dust and the noise of sanding machines, Kleen worked with meticulous precision and dedication.

“This is not a pleasant room,” he said of Hem. And yet, it was a space that lingered in the minds of its visitors – a home that touched on something deeply human: the impermanence and transformation of what we take for granted.