Ingvar Cronhammar: Ulvetime, HEART – Herning Art Museum
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Ingvar Cronhammar
UlvetimeOctober 8, 2022 – August 18, 2023
HEART – Herning art museum, Herning, DKUlvetime [The Wolf Hour] is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when the most people die, when sleep is deepest, and when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, and when ghosts and demons are at their strongest.
— Ingmar BergmanA year and a half after the artist’s death, HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art opens a condensed exhibition of the works that made Ingvar Cronhammar a household name. The exhibition conjures an illusion of the black, white, and red shadowland where the ideas for these works were born. HEART owns Denmark’s largest collection of Cronhammar’s works. Most of them must have been created in what can only be described as the Cronhammarian shadowland—a mixture of creation zone and psychogeographical reference land, which the artist himself referred to as a black and red area, with a white border in between.
Inspired by Bergman, we enter Cronhammar’s universe with the idea of the wolf hour as a transitional phase—the transition between life and death, good and evil, fear and relief. But the transition is also a crossing. Nothing is entirely one thing or the other. The wolf hour is the moment when the day begins to dawn, forcing us to face ourselves.
Life itself is at stake in Cronhammar’s works. This is serious business. Melancholy and pain always lurk alongside doubt. The works evoke a sense of an already realized apocalyptic state through their insistent high-tech, science fiction character. Large or small, Cronhammar’s works always carry an unsettling force. Their visual language is unheimlich in the Freudian sense. The works seem to belong to a psychological darkness, yet amidst this mechanical, shadowy universe, remnants of nature persist—animal bones and bird wings.
Cronhammar himself said of his works:
The works gain meaning and presence when stretched between the two poles of life: between the primal beauty, where we, almost entranced, experience God’s creative touch on one side, and on the other, the darkness—pain, gravity, melancholy. These are the two poles that form the resonance of life.
The works exist in their own world, acting as monumental brakes that force us to pause our daily lives and mundane perceptions.
Translated text from HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art -
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