6 Amazing Pieces at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, is one amazing museum. This particular institution collects art from the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Located on a lovely little island in Stockholm, the Moderna Museet holds true to their mission and features the most current, up-to-date art. Its unique and inspiring collection will make you love art museums even more and show you that art isn’t just a collection of dusty old things from the past.

Let me prove this to you by showing you some of the most interesting pieces of artwork I saw during my visit. If you make the trip to Moderna Museet, remember that it constantly displays new exhibitions and rotates the collection so you’ll always have a reason to go back.

6 Amazing Pieces at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet

1. Monogram by Robert Rauschenberg (1955-1959)

Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram is a combined painting. Rauschenberg mixes sculpture with painting with found objects with plenty of other random items to make this interesting, strange, and whimsical piece of art. And yes, that is a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its middle. If you want to see something unique, you’ve found it with Monogram. Not many people in the world can say they’ve seen a piece of art quite like this. The only downside is that it sits underneath a plexiglass vitrine so you can’t quite get a good enough picture of it. Fortunately, you can just buy a postcard and support the museum. After all, who is going to believe you unless you have a photo to show them?

2. Untitled (Fold) by Tauba Auerbach (2011)

Talk about an optical illusion — Auerbach’s application of acrylic to canvas makes you visualize actual folds where there are none. I can’t even crinkle a piece of paper by hand and make it look as real as Auerbach has. The metallic silver, blue, and red paint trick the eye so well that you’ll do a double take and then have to get up close to convince yourself the canvas is actually flat. I dare you to not be amazed.

3. Marquis Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac by Oskar Kokoschka (1910)

I found this particular portrait by Oskar Kokoschka to be an enchanting oddity. Marquis Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac displays an exterior that is simultaneously dapper and uneasy. Kokoschka may have depicted this man in such a way that the viewer can feel repulsion and attraction in tandem. Considering that Kokoschka painted it at a sanatorium in Switzerland, it makes sense that he produced a work mimicking the way humans normally feel about death – curious yet fearful. When you know that Kokoschka said the Marquis was “waiting at death’s door,” the reason for a skeletal facial structure and bony hands becomes clear.

6 Amazing Pieces at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet

4. Smile As If We Have Already Won by Miriam Bäckström (2012)

If you think Auerbach’s Untitled (Fold) is amazing, you won’t believe Bäckström’s piece. This tapestry made of silk, cotton, wool, and other fibers is a bit over nine feet tall by thirty-seven-and-a-half feet long. You know what’s even more mind blowing? You can’t tell it’s a tapestry upon first glance. It wasn’t until I got much closer to the piece that I even realized it was not a painting. Bäckström’s tapestry depicts what seems to be an individual made of mirrors or glass within an environment made of the same material. I’ve never seen a tapestry like it. Far from medieval wall carpets of yore, this piece revamps the definition of tapestry and shows they can be modern art.

6 Amazing Pieces at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet

5. Electric Chair by Andy Warhol (1967)

No collection of modern art would be complete without Warhol. The Moderna Museet holds plenty of his works but Electric Chair caught my eye. It’s different than what you might typically think of when considering Warhol. An electric chair certainly isn’t as popular as, say, Campbell’s soup or Marilyn Monroe, but it certainly has its own type of infamy.

I think this particular piece from Warhol speaks to the range of art that a visitor can expect from the Moderna Museet. You can see what you may typically associate with an artist but you can also see works that are unexpected.

6. Pepper No. 30 by Edward Weston (1930)

The Moderna Museet also houses a wonderful collection of photographs including Weston’s Pepper No. 30. In capturing the curiosity and beauty of a pepper, Weston shows how nature produces art through variation. Examining an everyday vegetable never was so intriguing or inspiring. The photograph makes you reconsider how you look at vegetation. I suppose that is the whole point of art though, to make you see something differently in much the same way as travel.

 

6 Amazing Pieces at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet top image of Stockholm by Unsplash.