The New Carlsberg Foundation chose to ask Kaspar Bonnén to take on a complex decoration assignment at the upper secondary school Horsens Gymnasium: a bare, high-ceilinged room with two large walls, each eight by five metres. In his studio on the island of Amager in the southern part of Copenhagen, Kasper Bonnén created 54 paintings in various sizes, which have now been combined at the school to form a story that sprawls over a total area of 60 square metres. ‘A story’ may in fact be too modest a term, as the combined painting contains a wealth of motifs and statements, weaving in and out among each other and constantly branching off in new, surprising direction.

‘The paintings are an attempt at creating meaning or exploring what meaning is. But they are also clearly a constant attempt at escaping something that is fixed and well-defined. There is a wide range of concepts at play in the picture: people debating and things that suddenly transform and become something else – changing from a rectangle to a box to a house, for example, or from a road to a river. This reflects the transformation processes that I think we all undergo all the time, as we make sense of things in our minds. Thus, the piece might be seen as a playful exploration of meaning and meaning-making, and it is a river of meaning, I hope’ Kaspar Bonnén explains.

From its early years, Horsens Gymnasium has strived to build an art collection with the dual purpose of decoration and education. Throughout, the school has sought to acquire art that reflects the spirit of its time, and the collection therefore includes works of art that have influenced their time; for example, ‘De unge vilde’ (‘wild youth’) from the 1980s have a strong representation.