Petra Gipp and Mikael Olsson

Petra Gipp and Mikael Olsson; Sigurd Lewerentz – Freestanding shows Sigurd Lewerentz’s architecture in a new light and connects historical drawings from ArkDes’ collections with newly produced works by architect Petra Gipp and artist Mikael Olsson. The exhibition is shown at the Architecture Biennale in Venice.

The exhibition is a response to the huge international interest in one of the most noted 20th century Swedish architects, Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975), whose collection can be found at ArkDes.

Three large-scale sectional models by Petra Gipp, 13 newly taken photographs by Mikael Olsson and 15 drawing facsimiles from ArkDes’ collections are shown in the exhibition. The contribution is an architectural and artistic reading of Lewerentz’s freestanding canopies to the Resurrection Chapel at Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm (1925), St. Knut’s and St. Gertrud’s chapel at Östra kyrkogården in Malmö (1943) and St. Mark’s Church in Björkhagen (1960).

In three sculpturally cast concrete sections, Gipp portrays Lewerentz’s monumental vestibules as intimate spaces, a spatial context for the visitor’s encounter between the inner architectural space and the wider landscape, religious and secular life. Questions of proximity, distance and temporality are also present brought up to date in Olsson’s photographic study, which, based on Lewerentz’s architecture, stages and expands the architectural and photographic space and its shifts in both a historical and contemporary perspective. Olsson’s photographs contain, just like Lewerentz’s architecture, several temporal dimensions: imperfect, present, future. Gipp’s sections and Olsson’s photographs create, together with Lewerentz’s drawings, a spatial installation at the intersection of art and architecture, then and now.

Together together with Gunnar Asplund Lewerentz won the competition for a new cemetery in Stockholm – Skogskyrkogården – in 1915. Lewerentz’s main contribution, in addition to the design of the landscape, was the strictly classicist Chapel of Resurrection. Lewerentz’s international fame was established with the two brick churches he worked on towards the end of his life: St. Mark’s Church and St. Petri’s Church in Klippan (1966).

Petra Gipp’s ↗ works combine architectural and sculptural expressions. Her way of working is characterized by a sensitivity to place, light and volume. Her best-known works include an award-winning Refugium at the Kivik Art Center and the Cathedral, the audiovisual design inventor workshop for which she was nominated for the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Prize.

Mikael Olsson ↗ has studied photography at the University of Gothenburg. In his previous work Södrakull Frösakull (Steidl, 2011) he examines ideas about perception and representation through two architectural works by Bruno Mathsson. Similar ideas are problematized in on | auf, where Olsson maps a pavilion by the architects Herzog & de Meuron and the artist Ai Weiwei – a project which, according to the author Péter Nádas, is characterized by “the tension between visual faculties and visual conventions, the reality of perception and the reality of vision, of the concrete and the abstract.”