Woman Seen from the Back (1888)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Seated Female Nude (1889)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Evening in the Drawing Room, The Artist’s Wife and Mother (1891)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Artemis (1893-1894)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Evening in the Drawing Room (1904)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Female Model (1909-1910)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
all photographs © 2019 Leslie Hossack
Vilhelm Hammershøi is best known for his empty spaces, both interiors and exteriors. However, many of his 377 paintings, drawings and sketches contain human figures, especially the female form. Above are six examples, all photographed by Leslie Hossack in 2019 in the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen.
These six paintings are part of the permanent collection of the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), and each one is characterized by Hammershøi’s distinctive muted palette. He was a collector of photographs and he appears to have been influenced by the visual language and palette of comtemporary prints.
“Hammershøi’s tone painting and coloristic aesthetic were clearly inspired by the photography of the day and the soft grayish-brown tone with which the photographers themselves tinted their pictures and endeavored to give them a ‘painterly’ expression.”
Henrik Wivel, Hammershøi in the David Collection (2017)
Hammershøi’s oeuvre consists of landscapes, architecture, portraits, nudes and interiors. However, it was his interiors that were the most popular in his lifetime (1864-1916) and continue to draw the strongest response today. Hammershøi painted over 100 interiors in the various apartments he shared with his wife Ida in Copenhagen. Their home was both his studio and a major motif in his work.
Over a century ago, Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi elevated
“Stay At Home. Work At Home.” to an art form.
Leslie Hossack’s Hammershøi Photographs are part of a larger body of work that explores Hitler’s Berlin, Stalin’s Moscow, Mussolini’s Rome, Churchill’s London, contested sites in Jerusalem, the NATO Headquarter Camp in Kosovo, buildings linked to the Japanese Canadian internment during WWII, the D-Day landing beaches of Normandy, the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands, Scotland’s Freemasons and Sigmund Freud’s Vienna.
To view more photographs by Leslie Hossack, please visit lesliehossack.com
HAUTE VITRINE 