Skissernas Museum is a charming art gallery that I think is the perfect place to spend a few hours on a cold and cloudy day. The Museum features permanent exhibitions for Swedish as well as international art, as well as a revolving rotation of temporary exhibitions. The curatorial choices are interesting - cultivated through an open dialogue between artist and director, or if the artist is deceased, a foundation, agent, family member or gallery representing and protecting the artist's work and rights.
You can enter and exit as many times as you like throughout the day, and photography is allowed permitted you don't use a flash. There are plenty of bathrooms available and there is also a locker room where the rent of the space is SEK10. Exhibition catalogues with detailed descriptions of the artworks are available in both in English and Swedish (Svenska).
The Entrance
[Transcribed wall text]
Skissernas Museum focuses on the role of sketches in the artistic process. Since 1934, the Museum has collected sketches in many different materials for artworks intended for public spaces such as squares, town halls and schools. The sketches provide insights into the working methods of the artists, how ideas are investigated and artworks take shape. Besides showing the significance of sketches as creative tools, the collection also reflects aesthetic values and the relationships between art and society. The sketches raise important questions: Who commissioned the artwork? How were the work and its location selected? And who paid? The questions are as important today as they were at the start of the last century. Discussing these questions as well as analysing the artistic expressions contribute to the understanding and sometimes contentious and debated processes that underpin the design of public spaces.
Today as before it is common for a work of public art to be selected through a competition. Sketches and models for winning competition entries are richly represented in the Museum's collection. In what way do these selected works tell us about their time? Unsuccessful competition entries are also displayed at the Museum, which is often the only context in which rejected and never-executed proposals live on. Are these to be considered failures, or are they valuable sources of knowledge about the values and decisions which shape public spaces? In many cases the Museum is also the only place offering the opportunity to study the original intention for artworks which have disappeared, been destroyed or changed over time in other ways.
Side exterior wall of the Museum
The Swedish Gallery
[Transcribed wall text]
This gallery displays sketches for public artworks in Sweden from the early 1900s up to the present. The works illustrate how different pictorial languages - from the figurative to the abstract - have existed side b side and provide insight into how artist and societal institutions have used art to communicate values and ideals. At the start of the previous century, art often represented beautfy and was also associated with properties such as goodness and truth. Sometimes themes from Swedish nature and history were used to express national identity. The notion of art as a truth-teller or beautifying adornment changed in the 1900s and public art became, to a larger extent, questioning and provocative as well as investigative and ironic. Public art today can also be temporary: performance or other short-lived interventions in urban space, sound, projections and moving images or digital work which only exist in the broader public forum of the digital world. Many artists today work with fleeting expressions or make digital sketches, while traditional sketching techniques and materials are still widely used.
The Bridge: The Swedish Gallery
The International Gallery
[Transcribed wall text]
The International Gallery of the Museum presents a selection of permanent and temporary projects from the end of the 1800s until today. During the first half of the 1900s, there were discussions in different contexts about how architects and artists would collaborate to integrate painting and sculpture in building or a place. Often the discussion invovled how the walls could be used as a surface for large mural paintings, mosaics and glass paintings, as in many of the projects on display in this room. Mural art functioned as both adornment and messenger of conservative as well as progressive ideals. Regardless of whether the expression was traditional or innovative, art was thus given an important social function. Several artists also emphasised the democratic role of art in the importance of reaching its people.
France was one fo the European countires in which ideas about the integration of the arts has the strongest foothold, and government investments in murals culminated at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. After the Second World War, the Catholic Church also gained significance in the dissemination of modern non-figurative art to a wide audience. An important reason why French art is so well represented in the collection is the influence it has had on Nordic art. Many of the Nordic artists studied with their French colleagues in Paris.
The Creative Workshop
The Mexican Collection
The Birth of the Work of Art Exhibition
Memory Matters Exhibition - on until 24 February 2019
In August 2017, violent clashes broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, when extreme right wing groups contested the city's decision to remove a statue of Southern Confederate Commander Robert E. Lee. The vents started a major debate on the future of American Confederate monuments. Just over a year after the confrontations in Charlottesville and the other comprehensive debates they provoked, Skissernas Museum - Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art presents Memory Matters. This is an exhibition about collective memory - memory which, unlike that of individual memory, is shared by many people, an entire group or society. Collective memory is often an expression of how a group of people in a position of power has chosen to recount and represent cultural and historic events, as in official memorials and monuments. But collective memories, like the monuments that embody them, are often contentious. Art provides the possibility of alternative perspectives on history and the expression of memories that have been silenced or repressed.
The exhibition shows works in various artistic practices from the past ten years, by artists from several different parts of the world. The works engage in a dialogue with contemporary social and political evnts and with the contexts in which the artists operate - from the silence after the dictatorship of Uruguay or the Soviet era in Lithuania, to expressions of post-colonial Angola and South Africa. Some of the artists transform and reinterpret traditional memorial forms such as statues and busts to comment, problematical and sometimes undermine official history. Others create new narratives by questioning previously accepted histories or by highlighting the circumstances that contribute to the formation of collective memories. Some of the works become unofficial memorials for people and events for whom such memorials were previously lacking - memorials that oppose oblivion, repression or active erasure to become new bearers of collective memory. Instead of the commissioned and official monuments and memorials in public space, the museum and the exhibition context become the space in which collective memories are shared.
The ambiguity of the exhibition title, in which the word matter is used in its meaning as both verb (to be significant, to be important) and as a noun (material, substance, subject), testifies to the importance of continuously discussing memorial culture and the construction of collective memories - the subject affects us all, not least artists. At the same time, the title alludes to the way in which memories are not only immaterial but are given physical expression, such as monuments in public space or as artworks in exhibition.
"Memory Matters" Exhibition Catalogue
The Gift Shop
Swedish books available for purchase
Cards!
English book and art supplies table
Cute seats made from cork in the reception area
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