Artist: Maiken Bent
Exhibition title: LØSØRE
Venue: Gl. Holtegaard, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: May 5 – July 2, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gl. Holtegaard
With multi-coloured fragments of stitched leather, painted silk, prints on wallpaper, bundles of glinting chains and contorted ropes, the artist Maiken Bent takes over Gl. Holtegaard in a radical mise-en-scène that transforms the historical interiors of the exhibition space.
To complete the three-year exhibition trilogy BAROQUE+Contemporary Art, the artist Maiken Bent has moved into Gl. Holtegaard, where she has taken the court architect Lauritz de Thurah’s furnishing of the country home he built in the mid 1700s as her point of departure.
Maiken Bent reinstates the central axis of the building, allowing light to pour through its windows so the symmetry of the baroque garden once again interacts with the architecture. As a tribute to Lauritz de Thurah, she intensifies and dramatizes the baroque spirit and architecture of the space with individual works of art that turn the house into a total installation.
The word LØSØRE – the title of the exhibition – means chattel, a legal term for moveable property. In the title, these moveable objects and possessions refer to the art exhibited in a gallery and the furniture, tableware, etc. in a home.
The exhibition is a seductive, aesthetic patchwork of objects and implements made of glinting buckles and chains, cudgels, harnesses, ropes, balls, straps and strips, colourful stitched leather, transparent textiles, and patterned wallpaper and rugs. Sculptural objects are lashed to the walls, placed on the floor, and hung from the ceiling like fetishized objects steeped in decadence. Maiken Bent makes the entire building a stage to explore the relationship between object, space and the body.
Artist’s book
As an integrated part of the exhibition Maiken Bent has created an artist’s book entitled (detail) in which she zooms in on the patterns, colours, lines and texture of her work. The book thus represents an image-saturated journey into minute details of the art of Maiken Bent.
Maiken Bent (b. 1980) lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. In November 2016 she was awarded the Elna and C.T. Hollesen Artist Grant. Her works are in the collections of art museums in Denmark and abroad, including Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Sorø Kunstmuseum, KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, and SKMU – Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Norway.
In the exhibition trilogy BAROQUE+Contemporary Art, Gl. Holtegaard has invited three Danish contemporary artists, whose work is inspired by or revisits the baroque, to enter a dialogue with Lauritz de Thurah’s stringent baroque architecture. Martin Erik Andersen was the first in the trilogy with the exhibition For Octavian to Prevail – Slum Baroque in 2015. The second artist was Ulrik Heltoft, with the exhibition 7 Films, a Photo and a Silver Nose. Maiken Bent is the third and final artist in the exhibition series with the exhibition LØSØRE.
