And the award for longest queue goes to…

Last November, I visited Liljevalchs for the Stockholm Cosmologies exhibition. As I wrote in my post that day, my favourite piece in the exhibition was by artist Ylva Snöfrid. Today, visiting Liljevalchs again, I was confronted by her latest works in an exhibition called The House of Muses. Or should I say work? It comprises 13 rooms which appear to contain the contents of her home and studio.

There are art works and objects and furniture. So much stuff that I wondered, as I walked around, what her house looks like at the moment being empty of everything. Unless she is now living in Liljevalchs for the eight months of the exhibition.

The exhibition is somewhat experiential with the visitor encouraged to interact with various pieces. There are supposed to be Guardians around but I have to say I didn’t see any. Maybe they were all on their lunch breaks.

Above is a room with a load of hand coloured blocks which someone had built a Jenga tower with. I have no idea who built it, whether it was visitor or Guardian or the artist herself. I do know that the guy from whom I bought my entrance ticket pushed the tower over, spreading the blocks across the floor.

The whole exhibition was like a journey through the artist’s head. And it was enthralling. That’s the word that best describes my overall feeling at the end. The final room I visited, which was actually Room 1, invites the visitor to sit on the big sofa and write something on a sheet of paper in coloured pencil.

I may not have interacted with any of the other rooms but no-one could call me shy of writing. I scrawled something appropriately intriguing before leaving.

I thought the whole exhibition was well worth the visit though, when I described it to Mirinda she was less than impressed. It is definitely one for the lover of modern art rather than fans of the ‘pretty picture’ brigade.

But that was not why I was in Stockholm today. My main reason for visiting was because I wanted to see four botanical paintings by Hilma af Klint exhibited in the latest exhibition at Prince Eugene’s place.

Now, I should preface this visit by saying that I am not e big fan of realistic paintings of flowers. Okay, I admit, they are created by talents far beyond anything I could possibly achieve. And they can be quite pretty. However, like still life paintings, too many of the same thing leaves me a bit bored after a while.

The thing is though, since last week’s lecture from my National Gallery art course, I have been unconsciously on the look-out for Ms Klint’s name and it popped up at the In Bloom – Art and Botany exhibition. Four of her paintings were included and I wanted to see them. So I did.

These were painted long before she started down the road to complete Abstraction. She studied botany and art and painted quite a few of these works. I think the two above have a touch of the 1920’s about them though they were made a long time before then.

It was a most enjoyable day made especially more so by the fact that the thousands of visitors to Stockholm were queued up outside the ABBA Museum, leaving the art galleries in peace. I thank them for that.