Exhibition

Poul Gernes has often thought that what he himself creates contains a certain monumentality - at least sometimes - and that this monumentality is of a special kind.

He says about the monumentality that it does not merely refer to a physical expanse; it is also a particular kind of content. He finds it intriguing that the inclination towards monumentality arises in a situation where there is a complete void to place it in. This should be seen in connection with his claim that we live in a cultureless time and that there is absolutely nothing to communicate.

It is a monumentality that has moved more and more away from the individual object to the spatial situation itself, so that the object as such no longer exists – an empty monumentality that is gradually being assigned a function in the everyday situation, in social space. 

The tendency towards dissolution, the dematerialisation of the object, was clearly seen in his huge hanging sculpture that filled Charlottenborg's lobby at the Spring Exhibition in 1968. The large boat-like shape appeared dissolved in part because of the light-reflecting silver foil with which it was covered, in part because of its suspension of iron chains and bands, which drew a dense web of lines through space. Unlike his previous sculptures, which were closed geometric shapes, the shape of the boat was open, a frame about 60 cm high, which also helped to cancel out the object effect.