CHANCE

Now and then, a random choice is as good as any other. The Moderna Museet collection contains so many works that most of them are in storage. The chance encounters that arise when works are put away, close to each other with no particular plan, sometimes reveal new aspects of images that we thought we knew well.

At first glance, this screen is a muddle of artistic styles, ideas and subjects. And yet, all the works could be described as portraits – personal or idealised pictures of people, portraits of other artists, snapshots. Together, they are also perhaps a portrait of the multitude of impressions, lives, voices, and narratives that make up the Moderna Museet collection.

In the museum galleries, works are often shown side by side with other works from the same period or context where their underlying ideas meet. When not on display, they are stored close together on screens in a storage. With its randomly mixed screens, the Study Gallery is sort of in between a warehouse and an open space where art is presented to the public. This particular screen shows a few disparate works in the way they are stored, where coincidence decides what is shown next to what Often, this can give rise to fortunate encounters between works of art from widely different periods and styles, and the unexpected links this generates can show us something new, when we read the works across time and space.

Filter and sort

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