In the summer of 2024, Ai Weiwei, a highly celebrated voice in the world art, will be setting up his installation Water Lilies #1 (2022) at Ordrupgaard. This spectacular work comprises more than 650,000 Lego bricks and, with an impressive length of fifteen metres, it is Ai's biggest Lego work to date. The enormous installation reconfigures one of the most iconic impressionist paintings, namely Claude Monet’s equally monumental triptych Water Lilies (1914–26), now at MoMA in New York. Whereas Monet excludes any hint of his own sorrowful life in his depiction of the tranquil beauty of the water lily pond, Ai inserts a black portal among the colourful water lilies, thus unlocking the narrative about his formative childhood years spent with his father in a Chinese work camp. The exhibition shows how Monet’s painting is woven into Ai's gripping life story to re-emerge as a confrontation with the systematic suppression of the freedom of speech, which the now exiled artist, and his father before him, have experienced on body and soul in their native China.
Learn more at Ordrupgaard.dk
