Swedish modernism and contemporary art
Norrköpings Konstmuseum welcomes everyone, adults and kids, to discover our exhibitions on their own or by joining one of our activities. In Ateljé Krumeluren you can try your hand at creating something in variety of materials with our art educators.
Hours
Closed
Mondays
Public holidays: 1/1 New Years Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, 1/5 Labour Day, Midsummer Eve, Midsummer Day, 24/12 Christmas Eve, 25/12 Christmas Day, 26/12 Boxing Day, 31/12 New Years Eve.
Guided tours
The guided tours has been cancelled due to covid 19/the corona virus. We refer to our Digital Museum.
Call the museum reception for details.
Contact
Reception
Phone: +46 (0)11 – 15 26 00
E-mail: konstmuseet@norrkoping.se
The Art Museum’s history began in 1901 when the industrialist Pehr Swartz donated the extensive art collection of diocese librarian E. H. Segerstéen to the Norrköping Art Society. The collection consisted of more than 500 artworks and was donated to the city when Norrköping opened the first museum and library in Villa Swartz in 1913. The art collection expanded with more donations and city architect Kurt von Schmalensee was commissioned to design a new building at Kristinaplatsen where Norrköpings Konstmuseum moved in 1946. Today Norrköpings Konstmuseum has one of the country’s finest collections of Swedish modernism and contemporary art as well as a comprehensive international collection of prints.
The Sculpture Park situated next to the Art Museum is a hidden gem, built with donations from Sture Gilgård and opened in 1960. The sculptures are part of the collection and contains artworks by amongst others Arne Jones, Olle Baertling, Elli Hemberg and Jacob Dahlgren in the park.
Norrköpings Konstmuseum has one of Sweden’s finest collections of Swedish modernist and contemporary art. It includes Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN), Otto G. Carlsund, Lena Cronqvist, Siri Derkert, Cecilia Edefalk, Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén, Carl Larsson and many others. Thanks to donations and bequests, the collection continues to grow, for instance, with contributions from the Friends of the Konstmuseum. In 2016, the Museum received a donation of 180 late 20th-century works from the gallerist Carl-Johan Bolander.
The collection also includes installations, prints, photography, design and crafts. Altogether, there are nearly 30,000 works in the Museum. In the sculpture park, which opened in 1960, you can see works by Olle Bærtling, Eric Grate, Elli Hemberg, Arne Jones and others. The print collection is international and goes far back in art history, with impressive pieces by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn and Francisco Goya. Swedish graphic artists are also plentifully represented.
The collection is continuously re-arranged to keep the presentation fresh and inspiring. We show smaller exhibitions on separate themes or oeuvres to show some of the rich material in storage. Surprising newcomers are displayed alongside modernist icons.
Norrköpings Konstmuseum is responsible for the city’s public art and manages the municipal art collection. In this way, the Museum contributes to urban development in Norrköping and promotes artistic design as a natural part of the local environment. This is one way of making art available to everyone in Norrköping. Schools, special needs housing and public places linked to urban development are our top priority. These projects are often developed in collaboration with other municipal organisations and companies, according to a mutual agreement. We are currently engaged in a major innovative public art initiative for the design of the waterfront district called Inre hamnen. Project drafts can be seen at the Museum.
Art in public spaces is essential in democracies, offering aesthetic experiences and opportunities for dialogue and reflection. The designed living environment enhances our understanding of everyday life.
EXHIBITIONS
For sixty years now, Lars Kleen has created art from everyday materials such as wood, cement and metal. His workshop is located in a disused linseed oil plant in Nacka just outside Stockholm. Lars Kleen refers to his works as constructions rather than sculptures. His working method positions his oeuvre somewhere in the borderlands between fine art, architecture and installation. His ingeniously designed constructions are seldom entirely finished; those who have followed Kleen’s career know that a construction may be revised and reworked into many different versions. In this sense, his artistic method can be likened to the variations on themes explored by jazz musicians.
Lars Kleen (b. 1941) studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1962 to 1965. After graduating, he worked in a boatyard in Ingarö in the Stockholm archipelago, where he learned the craft that allowed him to pursue a new artistic direction, from painting to construction. Kleen began to work with great integrity on large-scale projects, often in disused factories as well as his own workshop.
In their design, Kleen’s works often appear to defy the laws of physics and he seems to bring the material to life. He returns to themes such as houses, boats and nature, in shapes that convey something fundamental about life and about everything that is at once strong and fragile. It is as if Kleen wishes to acknowledge the contradictions, precisely because life is full of them.
The exhibition includes both brand new and a few older constructions, as well as drawings and models. Britta Kleen (b. 1944) exhibits drawings for the construction Rope (1995). The presentation also includes photographs taken by Gunnar Smoliansky (1933-2019) between 1973 and 2015. River is Lars Kleen’s first exhibition at Norrköpings Konstmuseum.
Wall
When I first saw Gallery 5 at Norrköpings Konstmuseum in 2020, almost immediately I thought of the construction Wall, which had by then been in storage for decades. Wall was created between 1986 and 1989.
The previous year, I had built a six-metre-high by twelve-metre-long wall of wooden tiles for Sundbyberg Station on the Stockholm Metro. I was keen to use the same construction technique using a jigsaw to cut the boards, which were then glued back together in blocks, this time more freely.
The wall consists of 72 pieces that bulge outward from zero to sixty centimetres.
/Lars Kleen
River
I began constructing River in my workshop in Nacka in around 2020. Later in the spring, when the pandemic struck, I moved my business to a disused chapel in Nordingrå.
River was related to two earlier constructions, Boat and Island, which I exhibited at Kummelholmen in Vårberg just outside Stockholm in 2018/19. River was also strongly influenced by the idea of Wall and the gallery in Norrköpings Konstmuseum in which I was hoping to exhibit it.
There are many differences between the two constructions but, despite the age difference, I think there are much that unites them.
/Lars Kleen
Rope
Rope is a 40-metre-long public artwork commissioned by Public Art Agency Sweden for the Swedish national synchrotron laboratory MAX-Lab, which opened in Lund in 1995. After several visits to the laboratory, the idea came to build a ‘rope’ to hang in the premises. Its length was to be the diameter of the synchrotron itself.
The artwork was based on a simple principle. I demonstrated this in a 1:10 scale cross-section of Rope, showing the three components: strands made of glued ribs that would twist through the construction. These were fastened with rebar every half metre, forming crosses and triangles. Together, these form long wave-like movements and, when illuminated, a shadow image appears on the floor or wall.
To build a full-scale version of Rope in the right materials, detailed drawings were required for each stage of the production of the artwork. These were prepared by my wife, Britta Kleen, who is an architect.
/Lars Kleen
Fall I & II
In around 2015, I built a construction I called Joists in my workshop in Nacka. This consisted of three tall chimneys or pillars clad in concrete elements. These supported a reinforcement mesh on which stones were placed.
The result was not at all what I had intended but, at the same time, I realised that the angled concrete elements, as they were lying on the floor, might work in their formations, a discovery that inspired me to rebuild the entire construction as Fall I and Fall II. The idea for Joists has not been abandoned, although it will be a different design.
/Lars Kleen
Street 6
On the podium in the room are 1:10 scale models of Street 6.
The Street Project started in 2001.
Since then, there have been five revisions.
Street 6 is the final version.
Two-thirds were completed as full-scale versions.
The origin of the whole thing was a brief sequence I watched on television over 20 years ago. A television crew was passing through a village in Bosnia during the war. On one side of the road stood charred chimney stacks, the remains of burnt-out houses. On the other side, scaffolding had been erected to build new houses.
/Lars Kleen
Tripod
In 1996, I exhibited at the derelict cotton mill in the industrial landscape here in Norrköping. I had the opportunity to visit an adjacent building called Värmekyrkan to gather worn building planks that were lying around in piles. I used these to build a prepared construction that I called Plank.
A few years later, I used the same building elements but with the addition of two windows, in a construction I called Tripod.
/Lars Kleen
Lars Kleen and Giovanni Battista Piranesi-Flow
Scenographer, architect and etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) arrived in Rome at the age of 20. He was immediately enchanted by the city’s ancient architecture, much of which was in ruins during the 1740s. In his detailed etchings, Piranesi depicts views of sites such as the Colosseum, Hadrian’s villa and the Pantheon.
Flow combines a selection of Piranesi’s etchings with constructions by Lars Kleen (b. 1941). The exhibition draws a temporal arch between antiquity and our own time. Both Kleen and Piranesi are fascinated by how, in a continuous flow, societies are constructed and collapse, only to be rebuilt. The art of construction is epitome of humankind’s endeavours here on earth.
River by Lars Kleen and Flow by Lars Kleen and Giovanni Battista Piranesi are produced by Norrköpings Konstmuseum
Curator: Helena Scragg
Exhibition architect: Britta Kleen
Thanks to Lars and Britta Kleen and family, and to the Gunnar Smoliansky Foundation
