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CONCRETE 27:th April – 4:th June 2001 Dance, music and art - there was a general dissolution of boundaries between these various art forms during the fertile twenties. The Ballets Suédois in Paris, with its "total theatre" was in the vanguard of this symbiosis. The dancers were actually transformed into living paintings. We are opening Dansmuseet's new gallery for temporary exhibitions with CONCRETE - Movement in twentieth-century Scandinavian art. This choice can be read as a declaration of intent with regard to our future plans for the new space: to turn it into an exciting meeting place for all forms of art, for boundless art. This premiere exhibition presents some 40 Scandinavian artists who in their individual ways find their point of departure in the radical twenties. They avoid representation in the traditional sense. They want to pull down the barriers between different artistic genres. Music, dance and architecture are decisive and movement, tone and dynamics are everything - expressed in painting and sculpture as lines, geometrical forms and bold excisions and colour combinations. This type of art is generally termed abstract or non-figurative; but a more adequate label is concrete art. The term was first used in 1929 by a group of artists in Paris and their message was absolutely clear. A painting should live its own life and should not be weighed down by an anecdotal or historical content. By merely "being" colour and form, it was claimed, art could dissolve cultural, national and linguistic boundaries. Expectations and optimism have seldom been greater - art was to be universal. This faith in the potential of non-figurative art lives on - though perhaps less dogmatically. Concrete art has sometimes been accused of being exclusive and obscure. This is one reason why some artists who worked in this genre are relatively little known. Perhaps it is not surprising that many of them succeeded very much better in Paris than at home. But growing interest in the design and architecture of this century and of the last one has rekindled peoples curiosity. The parallels between contemporary design and concrete art are sometimes very striking.
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