China Blue, which is the title of the artwork, is designed by the Danish textile designer and internationally acclaimed artist Astrid Krogh, who has previously produced integrated art for companies and institutions in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, among others.
Visual and Acoustic Functions
At first sight the artwork looks like a gigantic white and blue watercolour painting. It represents the Danish and Chinese skies fusing. The work also has a practical function and therefore consists of two layers of textile. Where the transparent layer makes it possible to screen the auditorium from sunlight, while at the same time maintaining the view, the heavier velour layer has an acoustic function. A total of 1,800 square metres of textile went into making the curtain.
The artwork is named after the cobalt blue china painting technique ‘China Blue‘. It is a Chinese technique from which Danish Royal Copenhagen’s well-known blue-fluted porcelain series has drawn inspiration.
Member of the Board of the New Carlsberg Foundation Stine Høholt says about the artwork: ‘Astrid Krogh’s artistic expression is poetic and demonstrates her acute focus on materials. At the same time, the large piece stresses her ability to integrate the architecture, the specific purpose and, in this case, the given cultural context’.
Astrid Krogh (born 1968) graduated from the Danish Design School’s faculty of textiles in 1997 to establish her own studio the following year. Since then she has worked collaboratively with architects and industrial designers and created commercial works of art for retailers such as Longchamp and Printemps in Paris. She has received government commissions for public works, and landmark projects include an exhibition at the Central Bank of Denmark (2015) and commissions for Nya Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm (2016), for which she was recently awarded the international CODA Prize. Astrid Krogh’s clients include Maersk, Velux and Coloplast, among others, and she has created site-specific art installations for the Danish Parliament, the Royal Danish Library, the Danish State Railways, the Netherlands’ National Healthy Authority and governmental organisations in Norway. She was awarded the Finn Juhl Architecture Prize in 2016 and is currently president of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for Crafts and Design Project Funding (2014-2017).
