Cool, Calm and Collected

  1. publication type — poster
  2. artist — Nicolai Howalt
  3. publisher — ARoS
  4. publishing year — 2017
  5. language — English
  6. editor — Marie Kappel Blegvad
  7. designed by — Lotte Helle-Valle
  8. format — 100
  9. no. of pages — 1
  10. no. of illustrations — 1
  11. cover — 300g paper, color offset
  12. no. of edition — 500
  13. ISBN — xxx

Cool, Calm and Collected is a song by the Rolling Stones about being suavely self-assured, but the expression is also used to describe a cool, Scandinavian aesthetic. The phrase serves as the title of this special exhibition featuring Danish contemporary artists who, in spite of their different approaches, all actively engage with an aesthetically stringent, poetic and cool formal idiom.

Overall, the exhibition showcases the aestheticizing tendency evident in many Danish artists over the course of the last fifteen years. At the same time the exhibition wishes to demonstrate the great diversity of their work, partly in their choice of materials and media, but also in the themes selected. For even though an overall aesthetic tendency seems to dominate the Danish art scene, the alluring exteriors of the art often hide surprisingly subversive, conceptual or critical content seething beneath the surface. Light Break – Wavelength is a documentary and aesthetic clash between photography, science and art by Nicolai Howalt. The exhibition reflects his basic and photographic interest for light as a material. In his studies Howalt uses the scientific methods and apparatus of the 1800. For example he has borrowed a number of Finsens telescopes from Medical Museion. Inspired by Finsens method, Howalt absorbs parts of the rays of the sun by using colored filters, and leaves the remaining selected area of the electromagnetic spectrum to pass through the original mountain crystal lenses. The light rays are thereby captured on to light-sensitive photographic paper (c-print, and the photographs become unique, primary impressions of parts of the sun’s rays.