Art: Damien Hirst and Mo(nu)ments!

Yesterday, I had a wonderful day. I took the day off from work and went swimming in the morning. Then I met a friend and we went to the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (in Oslo) to see the new exhibitions there. It was great. I've been to the museum some times before, but always alone. It's another experience altogether to discuss each artwork with a friend...

One of the exhibitions focused on Damien Hirst. I'm not too happy about all his work, but I'll mention a few that I liked:



His "Mother and child divided" is controversial. It is an artwork made by dividing a cow and a calf in two. There are two things I like about this: First, I find it interesting to notice my own feelings: looking at the animals from the outside, I'm pleased at their beauty. Looking at them from inside, I'm disgusted. Still, it's the insides I'm most often in touch with - I usually only see these animals when they're already divided and put in nice plastic containers in the supermarket. Therefore, I find this artwork to be a reasonable comment on my own feelings about the animals.

The second point is of course the title: in this artwork, the mother and the child are divided - both in the meaning of being separated from each other and divided in half. Modern agriculture of course separates animals without regard for their motherhood or childhood...



The second artwork I liked - partly - is "Beautiful amore, gasp eyes going into the top of the head and fluttering painting". I find it beautiful, and I also see that it is a comment on Jackson Pollock. This comment on Pollock goes on to his "butterfly paintings", which I don't like, although I find them fascinating...



The third artwork I enjoyed was a series of posters called "The Last Supper". Here, Hirst had manipulated medicine boxes to become his own label(s) of food. The possible interpretations are many, of course - a simple one would be to see it as a comment on a possible future where all human needs are met by pills.




The other exhibition contained works from the collection of the museum - and was called "Mo(nu)ments!". There were some interesting works there as well - my favorites were two paintings by Andy Warhol. One of them ("Shoes", if I remember the title correctly), was pretty and reminded me of a great song by Bare Egil Band. The other ("Multicoloured Retrospective") fascinated me - the idea of a painter making a "best of"-painting just like pop artist does... The painting includes the image of Marilyn Monroe, Mona Lisa, Mao and Campbell's Soup...

And after this stay at Astrup Fearnley, we went to eat a good dinner and then continued to the National Gallery. But I've written about the new exhibition there earlier in this blog... (Oslo's National Gallery)