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.“I think it’s thrilling to discover art in nature,” said Elisabeth
Millqvist, who, along with her husband, Matthias Givell, is co-director
of the foundation that oversees Wanås. “It makes you look more
carefully. You wonder what is man-made and what is nature.”
The labels are small and discreet at Wanås, and a big part of
the joy of the place is the unfettered encounters with art that it off ers.
Heading into the gallery where rotating exhibitions are staged,
I looked up and noticed, near the top of the gabled roof, two enormous
overlapping clocks created by Lithuanian-born artist Esther Shalev-
Gerz. One keeps real time, while the other has hands that go
backward. My initial reaction was to interpret the work, titled
Les Inséparables, as a commentary on regressive politics and culture.
But then it occurred to me that a double clock is actually a perfect
symbol for Wanås: a place that never forgets the past yet is moving
toward the future; it’s also a place where it is always time for art.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to a grand rural estate seemed dauntingly outdated and lonely.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 diffi cult 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 organised 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 aff air. She enlisted her husband to cook
for visiting artists, while her boys helped assemble artworks.
The show was a hit, attracting record numbers of visitors to
Wanås. So Marika 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 fi rst 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 programme offi cially 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 artist is always right,’ ” Marika
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.”T
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