I would like to begin with »The Egg.« It is a humble ceramic sculpture, which has been stand­ing among the trees along Alleen in Gothenburg since I was very small. I don't remember the artist's name. As its name suggests, it is an egg‑shaped, concrete sculpture covered with ceramics in coloured patterns. Its wealth of cosily‑sized cavi­ties and passages and its built‑in slide make it instantly appealing to a child. The double frisson of the pleasure in, and the shiver down the spine at, its narrow, smooth and rather amorphous cavi­ties and ledges, as well as the all‑too‑short ride down the slide, must be childhood memories shared by several generations of Gothenburgers­no matter where they grew up in the city. The joy recalled simply by the sight of it in the distance was my first direct confrontation with visual art.
They say that Sweden is the country where the ideas of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier found their clearest expression. The Swedish ambitions of educating the masses and of fostering a pro­ductive, educated and culturally‑aware working class were admirably suited to the ideas of the period's visual arts and to their instinct for acquir­ing a social‑as opposed to aesthetic‑function. I remember my parents' frequently expressed irri­tation over Sweden's becoming »a pure socialist state("‑something that returns to me constantly when I am visiting Poland or the former East Berlin, because they are places where I always immediately felt at home. A particular aesthetic characterised the art, which in those years collaborated with architecture on forming the image of the modern society. The public sphere was to appear as a new, for­ward‑looking source of energy. In any town with a modicum of self‑respect, mandatory new pattern­covered centres, new swimming baths with large areas covered with coloured tiles, factory canteens with cheerful murals, ornamental brickwork in school corridors and brightly coloured railway and underground stations appeared ‑ all public spaces were created in direct collaboration between con­crete painting or form and functionalist architec­ture. This became my second interface to visual art as a part of my everyday life. At present I am, as an artist, involved in the urban planning process for an extension of the city of Roskilde. Here, visual artists are being invited to participate on conditions that resemble those that hallmarked such a large part of public Sweden in the 'fifties. That is, visual art is basically still being asked to support a Utopian ideal: the creation of the new ))good city,(( an urban space without inconsequentiality, dirt, or dissonance. And what is even more important, to function as a com­pensation for the almost intolerable pragmatism that characterises contemporary building. My role in this project is supposedly to indicate where, in the totality of this process, could visual art's special form of experience be used in order to nudge the standardised production that charac­terises contemporary new urban areas. By grafting art's various forms of irrationality and non­functionally‑oriented perspectives onto selected parts of the planning phase as autonomous forces, it is at least possible to raise the question of whether there can be other approaches to build­ing production. Approaches that could lead to a different final result, to a more distinctive urban space. This work is my third, highly specific, experi­ence of the role of art outside its own spaces. The reason why I am telling you about these three meetings here is that they each in their own way make me a disciple of an attitude that set its stamp on the works of you and your generation. It is quite apparent that you mainly work with concrete painting (as discussed by Torgny Wilcke elsewhere in this catalogue), although I prefer to focus here on the variety of your works, i.e., the mobiles, crawlable sculptures, climable sculptures, colour schemes for furniture, chinaware, two very large hospitals and other buildings that you have decorated. Your works are sure to have formed encapsulated memories similar to my own in the adults and children who have viewed, touched or used your forms and colour schemes. For instance, I am certain that the children whose school breaks were spent in the vicinity of your enamel relief on Kongevejens School often and almost un­consciously have continued your work on the relief. Turned and twisted in their minds the individual forms that constitute the relief, studied it in a continued, often erratic, but always futile attempt to make it »pull itself together.(( Most of all, however, I wish to spotlight the way in which you turn towards the world beyond the space of art. You were one of the first Danish artists to accept the double role of expanding visual art's field of exploration to encompass much more than painting on canvas and, at the same time, of asserting that particular viewpoint, which is the logical consequence of intensive work with visual language. All of your works are intended for and designed as elements in a kind of func­tional situation, but we are never in any doubt that your point of departure is your undivided confidence in visual art's task of healing and unit­ing in a changed society. It seems to me that you and your generation had a very uncomplicated relationship to this double role‑ in contrast to me and most of my generation. You had ‑ perhaps ‑ a confidence in the modern, in art's indisputable role as the bearer of a new and pure expression, while maintaining just as strong a conviction that you actually could and should give to the public new, far more usable images to share. We, especially we who were children in the'70s, are rather more sceptical about the role of visual art as something that should collect and heal or interpret. For me, for instance, the role of the artist in the public space has become linked to the question of how public this space actually is. Who uses this space, and for what? Does not art on the square, at the swimming baths, in the railway sta­tion, on the bus and in all kinds of building merely become series of edifying images promoting a higher meaning in everything, thereby depicting a freedom from conflict and a state of ))democracy(( that are unreal? This is why many of us, almost certainly with the same optimism and Utopian approach, try to comprehend and project the image of a space behind a space, to openly visualise contradictions, or to trigger the partici­pation of those who use or dwell in the space in question. During this process, however, we frequently en­counter a demarcation problem ‑ i.e., that the public becomes uncertain about what is and is not art. And in consequence, the question of why we are working in public spaces at all? Seen against the background of this problem, your works for public space stand out as significant contributions to a contemporary strategy, as you choose with great consistency to apply the knowledge you have gained from working with your own distinctive form of expression. With the exception of your emblem ‑the form of the tear‑drop‑which almost invariably ac­companies you in variations specific to the location, you often choose not to give your con­tributions an expressly formal art language, or any layer of poetic superstructure. Your colours are present and are at rest in their own virtue. It is your artistic practice, the long years of work with the surface on the canvas, and your accumulated knowledge of colours and their capacity for form­ing space, that constitute your basis for the con­verse, i.e., for your ability to relate to spaces as if they were surfaces. Your ability to activate the force of a pure colour in the direct interplay with architectonic elements. Thus, you move your colours and tear‑drop form out into the world ‑to buildings and bicycles and furniture and busses and even to watch‑straps­on the basis of your belief in colour as a force in itself in the midst of a complex society. An egali­tarian interplay emerges, because you do not doubt the authority of painting as a form of knowledge in interplay with other forms of know­ledge, while stubbornly maintaining an unobtru­siveness that in practice makes room for the archi­tect and for the people who will use these spaces now and in the future. A dialogic position open to the changing times and to the madding crowd ‑preferably very close to the artwork.