Ting Klingeling
Henry Heerup's Assemblage Art
-
Ting Klingeling is the largest exhibition to date focusing on visual artist Henry Heerup’s so-called junk models – a radical form of work that in 1934 catapulted the young artist into the limelight of Danish art. The exhibition examines a lesser-known side of Heerup’s artistic practice through a presentation of over 50 junk models created across five decades.
90 years ago, Heerup exhibited the iconic junk model ‘The Rat’ (1934) at the avantgarde exhibition ‘linien’ at Charlottenborg. An art work that at once caused an outcry in the art world, but also earned Heerup respect and admiration, because he presented a new type of art made from found materials with a mummified rat mounted on a cross of wooden pieces. The work’s ambiguous references and material qualities not only represented a break with previous artistic values, but also constituted a new playful and spontaneous artistic method for Heerup.
Many people know Heerup’s paintings, granite sculptures and prints without having much knowledge of this avant-garde type of work, which Heerup continued to create throughout his life. About the junk models, Heerup himself said: ‘… I believe that even things from a landfill carry beauty in themselves, and that’s why I pull them out and put them together’. For Heerup there were possibilities in all objects; whether it was beer cans, a broom handle or a tin bucket, it was about finding the right way to join the given elements together in the artistic process, which resulted in the junk models. With his assemblage art, Heerup insisted on the equality of everything and cultivated a new form of materiality that did away with a hierarchical and elitist understanding of art. In their overall expression, the works appear imaginative and at times humorous, some even with more or less satirical undertones.
With Ting Klingeling, the Heerup Museum wants to give an insight into the great variety in Heerup’s many junk models; the smaller hanging birds, the abstract reliefs and the many different human figures from the sparkling ‘Photographer’ (1963) to the macabre ‘Death Harvesting’ (1943) with the scythe consisting of elements from discarded furniture. The exhibition also contains the only preserved junk model with the motif ‘Don Quixote’ (1970), which Heerup worked on several times throughout his lifetime. Heerup’s junk models are – in terms of their material and nature – fragile, and unfortunately many have been lost over time, but Heerup himself emphasized their impermanence, just as he also rebuilt existing junk models into new ones.
With their everyday-related materials, immediate creation practices and imaginative subjects or motifs, the junk models fully met the wishes of the avant-garde of the time for a new, freer and more accessible art. At the same time, the assemblages also consist of materials that already in themselves contain stories and references from previous contexts. In this way, the junk models tell a multitude of stories that encompass both past, present and future while bringing history into play in new exciting ways.
THE SPECIAL EXHIBITION IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY
The New Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the Knud Højgaard Foundation, the Lemvigh-Müller Foundation and the Hoffmann & Husmans Foundation