Industrial Arts

Since the early 1950'ies, a rich art milieu in Herning had evolved in many businesses in the city. The first company that marked the arts in that era was the shirt factory, Angli in Herning. Aage Damgaard was the owner of the factory. The factory moved from Herning to the suburb Birk.

C.F. Møller Architects designed the factory starting from a conceptual sketch by landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen. The scheme completed in the year 1965.

For almost two decades, beginning in the early 1950'ies Aage Damgaard invested in art. Either he purchased works or he invited artists to work at the factory. The artists were then given a salary, room and board and complete artistic freedom. Furthermore, they were given the materials and equipment they needed and the help from employees at Angli, local craftsmen and factories.

Enjoying this favorable environment, the Danish artist Paul Gadegaard was bound up with the Angli factory for more than a decade. Many Danish and international artists followed him, among them Sven Dalsgaard, Robert Jacobsen, Svend Wiig Hansen and Piero Manzoni.

Herning Art Museum has a unique collection of works by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The body of works derives from Manzoni's time with Aage Damgaard in Herning. Manzoni came to Herning to work three times in all.

Manzoni was only 27 years old when he first started in 1960 out of three persons, came to Herning and worked there. They showed videos for these industrial arts' activities in the Stone Hall during the program of Socle du Monde in 2004.

Manzoni's conceptual idea and concept led the starting element in the industrial work. Despite his untimely death in 1963, he performed in revolutionary ways to challenge and blow it firmly anchored modernist art concept.

His work dictates that the art works as a shape, which you find aesthetically pleasing and satisfactory in comparison to the space the art exists in it. This in turn fastens the art's relation with the subject matter it communicates.

Since the 1960'ies, this approach has been widely criticized.

By juxtaposing the physical and the metaphysical, the individual and the universal, Manzoni sought to redefine the concept of art. He renounced the figurative and narrative art in all shapes and forms.

Instead, he worked with the genesis of art - its formation process. Socle du monde 2004 reflects this conceptual move by focusing on both the process and the work: The process at the participating corporations is as important as the works exhibited at the different venues.

In a fusion of painting and sculpture, a unique universe emerged in which Manzoni deliberately provoked the traditional art's cardinal elements: the colour, the line and the matter. Manzoni further developed the ideas of artists such as the American abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock and the French pioneer of the monochrome painting, Yves Klein.

With a humorous and ironic reserve, Manzoni questions the shape and subject matter of art works. In his practical works, Manzoni questions the role of the artist and the relationship between art and the world that surrounds it.

This is evident in the work Corpo d'aria (a balloon containing the artist's breath) which obviously questions what art is suppose to contain. It is evident also in the work Socle du Monde that boldly pinpoints the whole world as an artwork or place of creativity.

Manzoni created art works in which the spectator is the one providing the work with its final meaning and significance.

In 1974, Aage Damgaard's shirt factory closed and the Angli Building was passed over The Trust of Schools and Culture in Mid-Jutland. An Art board counting Aage Damgaard, H. Schmidt Madsen and Hilmar Sølund conceived the first plan for a new Art Museum.

In April 1977, Herning Art Museum formally opened in the Angli Building. The collection that consists of national and international works was the result of a joining of the Angli Collection and the Collection of Herning Municipality. A selection of these works can be experienced in connection with Socle du Monde 2004 as a retrospective vue that relates to the new works created to the Biennial.

They prepared the building to unit Art and Business in a beautiful area according to the cardinal wish of Aage Damgaard. The pioneer, combined arts, design, food and wine of high quality into this pioneering work. However, the museum of arts presents some high quality paintings. Herning Art Museum and the educations at TEKO share the building.

The mother company Aage Damgaard owns breweries and restaurants. This company is now located in Lund near Herning in the central Denmark. Today the building functions according to the cardinal wish of Aage Damgaard - to unite Art and Business. Herning Art Museum and the educations at TEKO share the building.