Exhibitions 2006

October 21 - January 14 2007

In the exhibition Art for the People Millesgården presents a generous selection from the art collection of the Stockholm Consumer Cooperative Society, in celebration of the society's 90th anniversary 2006.

Most of the works remain today in the cooperative's offices and depots, making this exhibition, which reflects 90 years of collection as well as production through their book organisation's contributions and a cooperative cultural heritage, even more fascinating and relevant.

In common with educational institutions, the Stockholm Consumer Cooperative Society has a long tradition of adult education. The women pioneer organisation Swedish Home fused with the Stockholm cooperative in 1917. Ever since Ellen Key's, and later Gregor Paulsson's, ideas about beautifying the home have been important for the society. A guiding idea has been to spread good art at a reasonable price. Graphic technique, through lithography, woodcuts and linoleumcuts, were one way to reach a large public.

Through representative works from the collection the exhibition seeks to illuminate the interaction between art, society and the cooperative ideology and its practical reality. We encounter an ideology of  "the people´s home that both reflects a revolutionary pioneer spirit and a traditional viewpoint of art as an aesthetic, decorative object. In a way one may say that a period's "taste" is reflected and that many of the works are long since well-represented in Swedish homes.

The exhibition presents even a large number of posters, which were produced partially as advertisements and partially to influence opinion in social questions. Some were produced by artists enlisted on a freelance basis by the cooperative's advertising dept., among others the artists Gösta Kriland and Svenolov Ehrén, as well as the contracted designer Gunnar Orrby, which produced a number of design-classics during the 1940, 50 and 60's. The Stockholm Consumer Cooperative Society had a very creative and artistic advertising dept. during these decades and their director during the 1960's, Ulf Thomasson, contributed to their innovative development.

January 21 - March 26

In Chemical Life Support Marc Quinn discusses the constructed concept normality, which daily forms our experience of the other and of the self. He raises questions concerning what we mean with the concept of health and physical perfection. About the difference between what we consider to be a reality and that we think we see and experience, not least in regard to our own and other's bodies.

The body has often been a theme for Marc Quinn, where he has particularly interested himself with the body's mutability and various stages of life and death, thought and consciousness. 

The artist has made use of various materials, from bronze and marble to blood, glass, dough and ice, and charged his work with a discussion about the subject, by working on the basis of his own body, in for example works such as Self (1996), Incarnate (1996),and Bread Hands (1998). Chemical Life Support exhibits a number of sculpted bodies in natural size of existing people, all bearers of a chronic and/ or fatal illness.

Through treatment with medicines they have been given the possibility to live a relatively "normal" life. The artist has mixed the sculptures material, polymer-wax, with the respective life-supporting medicine.

Marc Quinn has depicted his own son, Lucas, suffering from milk allergy, with the addition of the lactos-free drink which the boy recieves as a substitute. Carl Whittaker, who survived a heart transplant, has been depicted with the addition of the blend of medicines which hinder his body from rejecting the donated organ. Silvia Petretti is an HIV-positive woman sculpted with a complement of her preventive medicine. Nicholas Grogan is a diabetic and the scupture includes the addition of insulin. Kate Hodgkison has her chemical support in medicine against Lupus disease.

In the exhibition's two busts, Anna Cannings (Blind from Birth) and Bill Waltier (Blind from Birth) 2005, depicting persons born blind, the empty,blank eyes without iris relate to ancient sculptures in which the original colouration which depicted the eye has disappeared, but in its present blank condition has come to be synonymous with seeing.

Marc Quinn was born in 1964, studied at Cambridge and lives in London. Marc Quinn has had solo exhibitions at Tate Gallery, London (1995). Kunstverein Hannover (1999), Fondazione Prada, Milano (2000) and The Irish Museum of Modern Art,Dublin (2004). Chemical Life Support is Marc Quinn's first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.