View of Jaegersborg Alle, Gentofte (1892)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Near Fortunen Jaegersborg Deer Park North of Copenhagen (1901)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Sunshower Gentofte Lake (1903)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Tree Trunks, Arresodal Frederiksvaerk (1904)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
From Christianshavn’s Canal Copenhagen (1905)
Collection: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
all photographs © 2019 Leslie Hossack
Vilhelm Hammershøi’s landscapes, although devoid of people, pulsate with energy. The five paintings above share a palette and sensibility that is evident, even at first glance. They also share a theme, timber, which is portrayed as trees growing near roadways in the countryside and masts floating on ships in the harbour. The last two canvases above, Tree Trunks, Arresodal Frederiksvaerk and From Christianshavn’s Canal Copenhagen are identical in some ways. The rigging on the masts and the branches on the tree seem to echo each other.
“Hammershøi did paint several pictures from Copenhagen Harbour… He stuck to the narrow canals of Christianshavn… One of these is From Christianshavn’s Canal Copenhagen… In this painting, which is a study for a larger picture, Hammershøi was interested in the compact pictorial structure created by the many lines of the rigging of the ships.”
Kasper Monrad, “Intense Absence,” Hammershøi and Europe (2014)
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 