The Henie-Onstad Art Centre ~ Norway’s Largest Museum Of Modern Art

Written by Winston Ramsbottom Friday, 16 December 2011 00:14

Henie-Onstad Art Centre is Norway’s largest museum of international modern art was established by famous ice skater Sonia Henie and her husband in 1968. It is also a centre for the performing arts, film and literature. The museum collection comprises work by artists from Picasso to Matisse and from Beuys to Christo, as well as by contemporary Norwegian artists. The ’sculpture walk’ in the large Sculpture Park connected to the arts centre is a place for regular Sunday activity throughout the Summer for children and adults alike. The centre also exhibits Ms Henie’s extensive trophy collection. The centre hosts several temporary exhibitions each year, focusing on Norwegian and international contemporary art. In 1994, the building was extended, and a two-story wing with exhibition spaces and technical rooms was added. This project was designed by noted architects—the new wing abuts the main body of the building as an organic extension. In 2003, another extension was made, this time in the form of an annex that extends into the outdoor park, connected to the main building by a passage leading from the lower level. In addition to six exhibition halls, the Centre also has an auditorium and smaller meeting rooms. Today, the total building area is approximately 9,500 square metres, of which 4,500 are occupied by exhibition spaces. The museum is the owner of a unique collection of Fluxus art that consists of 700 works. In 2007 Ken Freidman made a significant donation to the Art Centre. This was groundbreaking for the center's continued work with the collection, which in recent years have included a full photograph and registration of the material. Henie-Onstad Art Centre has Norway's largest collection of international modern art. A studio, a well-equipped workshop and dark room facilities are also available. Also available to the public is a library, which contains one of Norway’s largest collections of literature on modern and contemporary art. Art center is visited by around 200,000 people each year. The centre celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008.

The Henie Onstad Art Centre was the first significant manifestation of Neo-Expressionism construction design in Norway. Though architecture continues to change and develop as it has always done, important buildings have qualities that survive, and retain their meaning. The Art Centre at Høvikodden is such a building. Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen’s winning proposal for the architecture competition represented a conscious effort to create a more “expressive” form of architecture. Around the 1960s, modern architecture was certainly in need of a renaissance such as this. The building swiftly gained an international reputation when it first opened, and, to this day, it remains one of the nation’s most important cultural sites. The sheer number of new buildings erected during the post-war period had revealed modernism’s limited possibilities, and both in Norway and abroad our surroundings had become characterless and schematic. However, there were also positive tendencies. In Scandinavia in particular, a more “organic” view of architecture was evolving. The now renowned originator of this view was the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, who had enriched the stark, visual language of modernism with the use of natural forms and materials as early as 1930. Aalto’s aim was twofold: to create an architecture that was more humane, and to create the kind of architecture that was firmly rooted in a cultural tradition that centered around Scandinavia. These aims came to have a significant impact on the other Nordic countries. Although his buildings were essentially “Finnish”, the principles that lay behind them were of common interest to the Nordic countries in particular. As a continuation of this concept, Jørn Utzon created a similarly “Danish” style of architecture. Related tendencies also existed in other countries in Europe. At the beginning of the1950s, the French architect Le Corbusier began work on Ronchamp – a church for Catholic pilgrims. The result of his efforts was extraordinarily “expressive”. He himself described the building as a space specially created for spiritual concentration and meditation, and believed that the traditional, Spartan language of modernism was inappropriate. His solution was a sort of cave-like interior, where “mystical” light streamed into the building through small holes and slits. A kind of vaulting spans the interior – it seems to hover above the space, yet has a feeling of weight about it. To give the building presence and solidity, Le Corbusier designed a tower, which rose out of the sculptural mass of the building.