HYLAND
staying in palatial retreats where his skin-tight jeans, and
T-shirts didn't exactly win him praise. Besides making
him feel uncomfortable, even "ripped off" by $10 Cokes,
these excursions also led to an epiphany—"One day I
saw this Ross Bleckner painting And I thought: 'all the
paintings that I had of cows and shit can be taken away.'"
Initially acquiring a Julian Opie work, he's placed two of
those artist's high-res animations in The Thief's elevators,
and hired international art curator Sune Nordgren to ensure
that 105 works (graphics, photographs, sculptures, etc.)
are skillfully integrated into the hotel's interior design.
Insisting that The Thief's "gallery" approach is not a
mere marketing or decorative gimmick employed by most
hotels, Nordgren hopes to create an "art incubator" which
gives "guests a quality experience causing reflection and
to perhaps change their perception of reality for a brief
moment."
From Charlotte Thiis-Evensen's unsettling slow
motion video of three Somali Muslim girls to Peter Blake's
diamond dust accented photos of ice-skater Sonja Henie
(a notable art collector and Oslo museum founder)—a
sweeping palette of different art forms is used to "steal
away" old thinking about "mass production, bad taste
hotel art," to promote an exciting sense of visual
eclecticism. As Nordgren says, "to generate discussions"
Oslo Opera House
