Maya Lin’s
earthwork Eleven
Minute Mile
squiggles across
a cow pasture
at Wanås, which
is also one of
Sweden’s largest
organic dairy
farms.T
he story of how Wanås became an art
destination goes back to the mid
1980s, when Carl-Gustaf
Wachtmeister and his wife, Marika,
decided to settle down with their three sons
(they later had a daughter) at the estate, which
he’d inherited from his aristocratic family.
Marika, who was born in Sweden but had spent
her teenage years in Manhattan, was a
successful lawyer in Östergötland, a region
south of Stockholm, while Carl-Gustaf worked
in forestry. For a cosmopolitan couple with an
active social life, retreating to a grand rural
estate seemed dauntingly outdated and lonely.
“Moving to Wanås was quite difficult for us,”
Marika told me.
To liven things up, she decided to pursue a
budding passion by bringing contemporary art
to Wanås. In 1987 she took time away from her
law career and organized an exhibition at the
estate (which has been open to the public since
1900), featuring 25 artists, most of them Nordic.
“I just wrote them each a letter,” Marika
recalled, laughing at her own moxie. From the
beginning, the project was a family affair. She
enlisted her husband to cook for visiting artists,
while her boys helped assemble artworks. The
show was a hit, attracting record numbers of
v isitors to Wa nås. So Ma r i ka just kept going.
During the past three decades, Wanås has
presented new shows almost every year, with
some 350 artists exhibited to date. Early on,
most pieces were installed temporarily in the
castle’s formal English garden. One exception
was American artist Bernard Kirschenbaum’s
Cable Arc, which became the first work to enter
the estate’s permanent collection. Composed of
a wire strung between two metal triangles
across a pond, the minimalist piece subtly sags
and tightens with changes in temperature, and
its location behind the garden extended the
physical boundaries of where art was shown
at Wanås.
The art program officially ventured off-piste
in the early 90s when German sculptor Gloria
Friedmann sought to put her piece, Stigma—a
massive curved metal wall painted a jolting
shade of red—deep in the forest next to an old
oak tree. The Wachtmeisters hesitated because
it meant draining the area and resurfacing a
road so it could be accessed, but soon they
agreed. “Our motto from the beginning has
been ‘The a r tist is a lways r ight,’ ” Ma r i ka
explained as we talked in the sitting room of the
castle, which is off-limits to visitors. “If an
artist wants sixty tons of concrete you’d better
get sixty tons of concrete.”92 OCTOBER 2017 / TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM