Gallery 01:1

THE SALON

There are many ways to talk about this gallery. We share three stories.

1. Every museum collection is necessarily a brief and incomplete history of something. The story is always beginning. On the grid-turned-salon, on the blue “stage” in the center of the room, a possible history of abstraction unfolds through a painting of the artist Ernest Mancoba: Untitled (1962). Born in South Africa in 1904, Mancoba moved to a small village outside of Copenhagen in 1947. There he was introduced to painter Asger Jorn, a founding member of the CoBrA group. Considered the European counterpart to Abstract Expressionism in the United States, this short-lived but highly influential artist collective was known for their intuitive approach to subject matter, as well as gestural and colourful painting style. As the only black artist in CoBrA, Mancoba was marginalised by critics, art historians, and even his peers. He left for Paris in 1950.

In his work, Mancoba sought to reconcile spirit and matter, uniting myriad references into what he called a “central figure”. This figure represented an essence for him and was always present, yet potentially elusive: “What I am concerned with, is whether the form can bring to life and transmit, with the strongest effect and by the lightest means possible, the being which has been in me and aspires to expression.” Mancoba may have given the definitive definition of abstraction. From Mancoba’s painting, we trace abstract marks, gestures, movements, colours, from the inner figure to the very edge of the canvas.

2. Jazz helped create the marks, gestures, movements, and colours you see in this room. Let us consider Louis Armstrong – a musician who was widely celebrated among his peers in 20th-century jazz, while also perceived by some as a “sellout”, because he did not use his considerable fame among white audiences to point to the racial violence against black Americans.

You’re listening to Armstrong’s song “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue”. He performed this version of the song on May 24, 1956, in Accra, currently the capital of Ghana. Among the guests in the audience of this auspicious concert was the Ghanese Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He would lead the country to independence from the British empire nine months later, making Ghana a beacon for black people living in the African diaspora in the USA and elsewhere.

Every month, the chair – created by Rashid Johnson for the exhibition – will be occupied by various musicians, playing to the various tunes in this room. Check Moderna Museet’s website for more information.

  3.Two works by Rashid Johnson from Moderna Museet’s collection are installed on the backside of the steel grid. The photograph Negro (2001) – a self-portrait of sorts, developed in the Van Dyke Brown printing technique that yields a rich brown colour as opposed to the blue of the more historical cyanotype printing technique – faces the entrance to the next room, where Marcel Duchamp and Elliot Erwitt await you.

Opposite of Bruise Painting “Catch a Bad One” (2021) is Rashid’s new work, which he calls a “God” painting, in reference to his exploration of spirituality. The so-called vesica piscis – the almond-shaped symbol – is the space that appears between two overlapping circles. The lines that shape the symbol constitute the threshold between spirit and matter. We are in-between, at the core of Rashid’s project, a liminal space that holds all possibilities. Perhaps here we find Mancoba’s inner being that “aspires to expression”, as Rashid gestures towards the possibility of a spiritual journey through paint, carving out the symbol on the canvas by layering, scratching, adding, removing, marking, and erasing.