AARHUS .- The store rooms extending far below the ARoS galleries are filled with thousands of artworks. Standing shoulder to shoulder, sculptures, installation art, and paintings wait to be set up for the benefit of ARoS visitors. The exhibition FORM, COLOUR, PLANE brings a number of these works to light, presenting them in ways not seen before: non-figurative works spanning 85 years with characteristic forms, colours, and planes.

‘The exhibition FORM, COLOUR, PLANE is an attempt at presenting the ARoS collection in ways that are innovative, untraditional and, more than anything, colourful. The recognisable is placed in novel contexts and new and startling perspectives are created. We want to explore our customary emotions and views on the recognisable. This we do through a kind of serious play with works from the permanent museum collection,’ says Erlend Høyersten, museum director, ARoS.

ART AND DESIGN
FORM, COLOUR, PLANE seeks to emulate design culture by juxtaposing the exhibited artworks with various design objects and utensils. In this way, the exhibition reveals how non-figurative visual art has been instrumental in forming our way of life. Experience Verner Panton’s Flower Pot lamps in the light of visual art’s tribute to bright colours in the 1960s, while Ray & Charles Eames’s classic moulded plastic chair from 1950 is seen in the context of visual artists’ experiments with plastic sculptures.

MAN – ABSENT AND PRESENT
Non-figurative art is often viewed as inaccessible. Many people share the view that it does not represent anything. It remains a fact, however, that the geometric constructions and bright colours originally had a strong link with the surrounding world. For there was an underlying wish to create a better world following the atrocities of World Wars I and II. Using art and a new idiom as leverage, the artists wanted to construct a different society and make a fresh start.

FORM, COLOUR, PLANE takes the audience on a journey from the Danish avant-garde artist Franciska Clausen from the thirties to the art of the nineties and noughties exemplified by Jeppe Hein and Olafur Eliasson, who – preoccupied with simple forms, colours, and light – experiment with a tactile, sensuous experience centred on man.

Exhibition curated by: Erik Nørager Pedersen and Pernille Taagaard Dinesen, both curators at ARoS.