“Little House”

The German artist, Sonia Rentsch is working up a little old house on the ground of Kunsthal 44 Møen: Once a barn, with a combined kitchen and laundry, a chamber and a loft. The house is awakened from its sleep and freed from clutter and dust. In the barn, the floor is covered with loose cobble stones, and the joints was filled with soil and dirt. It is cleaned, and the space filled with beach sand.
In the kitchen the stove is heated, and there is bread baking in the oven. The small chamber is now a bathroom with a washstand and a chamber pot. In the loft the floor will be scrubbed with dye, given a layer of straw and made up with white sheets.
The artist is living on Møn during the exhibition period to further develop the site-specific work.

Who lives here and bakes? Whose beds are freshly made and untouched in the attic? Upon first encounter with Sonja Rentsch’s artistic practices one might take a minute or two to wonder. And for that moment of awe she supplies you with freshly backed bread and a glass of clear water. Often in her site specific interventions, appropriations and alterations the places and objects she takes care of come out whitewashed and cleaned, freed of the dust of time. For 44 Møen she freed the old horse staples facing the Kunsthal of dirt and rubbish. She skilfully restored and arranged the objects in the house and carefully added a lamp or two, poured sand from the sea at the threshold and made the beds in the attic. And for Lille Hus a white horse called Sebastian will be at the opening, its saddle placed on the chair in the entrance and eating grass in the backyard for the rest of the day. Rentsch shows not only an exceptional sensitive to a surface of a chalk wall or the color of a white lamp. She also manages to create spaces that feel as if they are neither from the here and now, nor that they are from an undated past. A space like Lille Hus make you as a visitor the character that was missing in a play being continuously told – a work in progress. And while sitting in her kitchen and tasting her fresh bread, smelling the burning wood from the old stove, you might become another character in a story taking place around us in that very moment.