The Free Exhibition Building

Facts

Artists fly in the face of censorship

By Louise Straarup-Hansen, Mag.art. i kunsthistorie (5 stories)

The Free Exhibition Building was built in 1898 in Oslo Plads across the road from Østerport Station in Copenhagen. The simple white wooden building was designed by artist Jens Ferdinand Willumsen. Architect Tyge Hvass designed the small extension that was added in 1954. The exhibition building is run by a league of artists called The Free. Artists such as Vilhelm Hammershøi and J.F. Willumsen established the league in 1891 in an attempt to break the academic monopolistic stranglehold of the artistic elite. Time and again, the committee of censors rejected the young artists' pictures that were submitted for the prestigious and strictly traditional Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg. Now The Free could stage its own alternative, uncensored exhibitions.

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High hopes for Pegasus

Story written by Louise Straarup-Hansen

Time / Periode 1898

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The gable above the entrance to The Free Exhibition Building is decorated with a mural of a robust, muscle-bound stallion in full flight, nostrils flaring and tail aflutter. The stallion has just taken off, rising above the earth and into the sky. The horse is Pegasus, a well-known creature from Greek mythology. It represented poetic inspiration and free art. Astride it sits a powerfully built naked young man with his arms reaching up to the sky as if to symbolise free upwards flight. The gilt Pegasus and its young cargo on the gable symbolise the free young art that is exhibited in The Free Exhibition Building.