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Have you ever wondered what war smells like? Or consider the smell of love, or the medieval smell ParisOr the sacred fragrance of religion?
A new exhibition in Germany allows visitors to discover the unknown world of smell by smelling 81 different scents in 37 different galleries.
The show “The Secret Power of Scents,” which opens to the public on Wednesday at the Kunstpalast museum in the western city of Düsseldorf, combines scents with art, taking visitors on a journey through more than 1,000 years of cultural history.
“This exhibition is an experiment – and an invitation for our visitors to discover the history of scent with their noses,” said Felix Kramer, director general of the museum.
The exhibition follows a chronological order, from religious artefacts of the Middle Ages to contemporary art of the 21st century. Various galleries are equipped with scent steles, atomizers and diffusers to create a connection between the art and the scent of a specific time period or cultural context.
waves Myrrh flows through a dark gallery Christian Wood carvings depicting various scenes from the Bible. The show explains that Christianity, but also Judaism and Islam, use myrrh as a symbol of prayer and purification.
Scent produces direct emotional responses more strongly than any other sense. So it is surprising now that when visitors press a button in a gallery depicting a World War I battle they almost recoil in fear. The smell coming from the diffuser was created by combining the pungent smell of gunpowder with the metallic smell of blood and sulphur.
“Anybody who has ever experienced war, traditional war, will hate it, because you can really smell the brutality of war here,” said Robert Muller-Grunow, the show’s curator and leading expert in the field of smell and fragrance technology.
“This is the first exhibition worldwide to bring fragrance to a museum in this form, format and scale,” he said.
On the other side of the fragrance spectrum, there is Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens’s Venus and Adonis painting of 1610 which depicts two lovers.
“This room is all about passion and emotion,” Müller-Grunow said, adding that the scents here are dominated by the smell of roses and civet – a cat whose scent was considered erotic in the 17th century, but today’s visitors have to turn up their noses in disgust.
Some smells are also linked to different eras of history – pressing a button to release the stench of medieval Paris left some visitors suffocated as they breathed in a mixture of canalisation, mold and dirty bodies.
On the other hand, in a gallery dedicated to the 1920s there is an oil painting by Gert Wollheim from 1924, called Farewell from Düsseldorf, which celebrates the emancipation of women, who at that time began to wear bold lipstick, cut their hair and smoke cigarettes in public. The room is filled with the captivating scent of tobacco, vanilla and leather – a blend that is reminiscent of famous early scents such as the historic Tabac Blonde, which was launched by fragrance house Caron in 1919.
Moving towards modern art, the museum presents more contemporary scents among the works of Andy Warhol, Yves Klein or Günther Uecker, reminding visitors of world-famous brands such as Coca-Cola or the German airline carrier. Eurowings – Which spreads a pleasant and relaxing fragrance as the passengers board the aircraft.
In addition to the application of fragrances in marketing, the museum also shows the role of very modern fragrances such as the fragrance molecule “Iso e Super”, which is not a type of gasoline, but a bright fragrance that makes it more attractive to those who wear it.
The curator said, “It’s a scent that smells like cedar wood, but there’s also something very velvety and skin-like about it.” “Its smell is very human, warm and charmingly approachable.”
For visitors strolling and smelling the show, which runs through March 8, the 81 different scents opened up a whole new world, said visitor Kirsten Ganoth.
“I’ve seen the collections here before, but now it’s completely new, with paintings and scents that match the eras,” she said. “Combining art with fragrance is exciting.”