DENMARK.- My Home My House My Stilthouse can be seen in a multifunctional manner as the viewer can discover many different settings in the subject and its surroundings. It consists out of clear lines but at the same time these lines are an abstract entity. In leaving a certain roughness and openness in the work Arne Quinze gives the viewer the opportunity to discover how people conduct their lives, live around each other and order society. The exhibition is on view June 1 through October 2, 2011 at the Louisiana Museum.

My Home My House My Stilthouse is based on the idea everyone is setting their borders to protect themselves and look for shelter. The big question is: What is my house, what is my home? In every new phase in life the search for protection and shelter is certainly a continuum. From the very start, when you're just a small young human being you start building a simple booth camp under the table with white cloth where you can retreat yourself and stay in your small cocoon, a first house.

Then you start creating your second house by wearing clothes and becoming aware that running around naked doesn’t give you the feeling of being safe.

In a next phase man starts building a house existing out of solid walls again seeking the ultimate protection. You're founding your territory and limiting yourself. Whiting the lines of your ground premises you want to stay their and scream it out: this is my home: My Home My House. It’s a human urge to possess a house, a territory, a household… As soon as the territory is in man’s possession he beacons it with high fences to create a safe haven, My Safe Garden. Every one of us has a ‘Safe Garden’. Every one of us also has a ‘Secret Garden’, a place where they want to feel safe and protected, a place that they can claim for themselves and close off for others, a place where they are in charge of who and what gains access to this enclosed zone.

But he’s still not feeling sheltered thorough, he’s looking for the best view to improve his position and to escape the conditions he’s still confronted with on the ground floor. A Stilthouse is built higher and higher generating the ultimate protection as no one can reach him anymore: My Home My House My Stilthouse.

Safe Gardens Paintings
These paintings came into being when Arne Quinze let himself be inspired by the impressionist canvasses ‘Les Nympheas’ of Claude Monet. During the creation process he realized he was undertaking a mental journey as it were and got wrapped up in his own world more and more, until he reached the moment in which he discovered his own safe gardens. ‘My Secret Garden”, a symbol for the mind and thoughts of the artist, forms part of the entire My Safe Garden, where My Home My House My Stilthouse resides in. This is a safe garden in which all the surroundings and his world are faced with limits. In a Secret Garden everything is hidden and there is no possibility of sharing things with another person. Secret Gardens are always visually empty, because they can only exist in the hidden part of the mind. The fenced-off area stands for everything that cannot be touched by strangers. That is why My Secret Garden forms part of My Safe Garden, it is an element of the entire world of the artist and protects by putting up fences.

This gives rise to questions, such as: What happens if a strange element suddenly appears in my fenced-off area? Can a stranger walk around in my protected zone? Can I share the area that I consider to be my personal resting zone with others? Up to where does my freedom reach? When do I regard someone as an intruder in my personal domain? Arne Quinze’s work offers people a framework to contemplate for a moment and think about how they live and organize their lives with regards to others, the familiar and the unfamiliar. The purpose of his work is to stimulate people to reflect about how they are, what their general characteristics are and where their boundaries lie and in this way lead to more insight in the inner self.

Arne Quinze was born in 1971 in Belgium and lives and works in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium. In the eighties he began working as a graffiti artist; he never finished an official art education. Having since established success on a grander international scale, he continues to draw inspiration from both urban and natural landscapes. He creates large and small sculptures, drawings, paintings, and large-scale installations. Recurring fundamentals in his oeuvre are social interaction, communication, and urbanism. His unconventional public installations have challenged perceptions in the city centers of Belgium (Cityscape, The Sequence), Germany (The Traveller), France (Camille), Lebanon (The Visitor), China (Red Beacon) and the USA (Uchronia, Timegate), among others. Arne Quinze breathes new life into used materials as he recycles them into intriguing forms rich with layers, textures and colors. Since a while he’s doing research towards large steel installations.