Hammershøi i Dreyer Exhibition

The Hammershoi and Dreyer exhibition was held at the CCCB – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona – between January 25th and May 1st, 2007. The project is a cooperation between RCR architects, who designed the architectural space, and the Spanish lighting designer Maurici Ginés and the team of Artec3, who developed the lighting design according to the exhibition general planning.

The exhibition was divided in two parts, and had a clear development from the beginning to the end. The first part introduced the life and relations between the two artists and the second part was dedicated to their work. In the beginning and at the end, light itself is information, opening with the title and finishing with a comment about lighting. In all cases, light acts as a conductor.

The art works of both Hammershoi and Dreyer – paintings and films – were deeply analyzed regarding the aspects of light and atmosphere – the “soul” – and that process generated the sources for the development of the lighting for the exhibition and the possibility to plan it consistently with the space design. The intention was to illuminate and emphasize the light in the artworks, which is the link proposed by the exhibition concept.

There were some spaces where this intention was clear, where the magical ambiences from the movie-maker appear over the painter, and other spaces harmonized through the emphasis on the light expressed in the paintings. Those spaces also act as equilibrium-zones in relation to the visual tensions along the exhibition following. The entire exhibition transmits the strength, complexity and the intentions of the artists through the use of tones of grey-colors, due to the interaction of light with the textile material of the surfaces.

The light in the works of art was the inspiration for the lighting design concept and its development lead to a method based on the idea of a luminous-museography.
The lighting of the exhibition consisted of seven different typologies: Light is information, Lateral Light, Focal Light, Neutral Light, Darkness, Light and Landscape, Projected Light. Light is always contained in the coming out of the documentation.

CCCB - Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

Architects: RCR + Pau Llimona