Mette vangsgaard
Conversation Pieces
The Danish Embassy Washington D.C. 2016
The works are placed in the dining room at the Embassy where they will be included in the setting of the table at different dinner parties. This is picking up on the 18th-century Rococo tradition of so called conversation pieces – sculptural objects placed in the middle of a lavishly-set dining table to invite conversation. The idea is that guests during dinners will be engaged in conversation about Danish culture.
These works are a part of the project ‘Art in Embassy’ where several works from the Danish Arts Foundation are installed at the Embassy presenting contemporary Danish art, craft and design.
HELIUM
Odsherreds Kunstmuseum
17. 2 - 8.12. 2024
In the exhibition helium, Mette Vangsgaard highlights how nature and humankind continue to be inextricably linked in a state of perpetual transformation. Rather than traditional landscapes and flower motifs, we meet people, wildlife and plantlife coexisiting in an erratic present characterized by instability. The exhibition is based on Vangsgaard's investigation of how processes of change and unpredictablility affect us as humans.The motif is modern rural life, composed of wildlife, plantlife and scenes from the everyday – based, in part, on Vangsgaard's own childhood, growing up in the Zealand countryside of Denmark. In her artistic practice, elements of humor and the absurd often coexist with underlying elements of social realism.Helium is derived from the Greek name for the sun and the sun god, Helios. The title of the exhibition refers not only to, the Sun Chariot, the famous Bronze Age artefact from Odsherred, but also to the instability of helium as a chemical element. An instability that characterizes the times in which we live.
The exhibition are supported by Grosserer F. L. Foghts Fond, Louis Hansen Fonden, Yorks Fond, Danish Arts Foundation
