An exhibition from a project by students of Spatial Design at the Institute of Architecture and Design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture and Design (KADK).
the exhibition continues until 20 March 2020
This is the last opportunity to see Porcelain Plus at Officinet - the gallery of Danske Kunsthåndværkere og Designere in Bredgade in Copenhagen - as the exhibition closes tomorrow 29 February 2020.
Porcelain Plus has been curated by Bettina Køppe of the gallery Køppe Contemporary Objects in Nexø on Bornholm.
Here are shown works by three major Scandinavian ceramic artists with all three working in porcelain and all three artists use slip pouring or casting.
All three show how their works have evolved as they explore specific ideas or a number of themes but also, through the development of their skills and their specific techniques, they explore the qualities of their chosen material to discover what is possible and what is not possible as they exploit what is essential about the qualities of porcelain.
But here, with the current works of the three artists, their pieces could hardly be more different.
Porcelain Plus at Officinet -
the gallery of Danske Kunsthåndværkere og Designere
in Bredgade in Copenhagen -
opened on 7 February 2020 and continues until 29 February.
Officinet, Danske Kunsthåndvækere & Designere
Køppe Contemporary Objects
Mia Göransson
Still Life, 2017
Bodil Manz
Dessau ll, 2019
Irene Nordli
Opløst Venus, 2020
A major retrospective of the work of the Danish painter Anna Ancher opened on 8 February.
This is the perfect counterpoint to the exhibition of the paintings of Paul Fisher that is the first exhibition at the re-opening of the Museum of Copenhagen. The painters were almost exact contemporaries - Anna Ancher was a year older - but whereas Fischer produced a key record of metropolitan life around 1900 and his paintings of street scenes in Copenhagen are influenced by what he knew of the sophisticated elegance of Paris, Anna Ancher was a leading member of the group of artists who met at Skagen, the fishing settlement at the very northern tip of Jutland. She records her friends and the people she knew there in the settings of their homes and gardens in languid summers and with a strong and almost tangible sense of what was best about provincial life.
Both artists were fascinated by and painted the northern light of Denmark and Anna Ancher certainly knew and was influenced by French art of the period and that influenced the way she used and appreciated and experimented with colour. The exhibition here, includes the artists own crayons or pastels and there are studies shown here that she produced of light or sea scape in pastels or in oils that are stunning.
Her studies of interiors show a mix of furniture periods and styles in comfortable and well-used or clearly occupied rooms and many of the figures or portraits she painted are sharply observed characterisations of people in her circle of family or friends who came to stay and who she knew so well …. there is an outstanding study of her husband slumped back in a chair with one slipper off … either exhausted by the effort of putting on a new pair of stiff leather boots or, possibly, daunted by the thought of the struggle ahead in putting them on.
Paintings of large gatherings of friends dining outside must set a standard for every Danish family with a summer house.
the exhibition on the work of Anna Ancher continues at
Statens Museum for Kunst until 24 May 2020
For the opening exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen, the work of the painter Paul Fischer is an inspired choice.
Fischer was born in 1860, visited Paris between 1890 and 1895 and died in 1934 so his paintings of street scenes and middle-class life in the city reveals much about a great and crucial but possibly now under-appreciated period in the development of Danish architecture and art.
It was certainly a formative period for technology in Copenhagen - a point of transition to a city with electric trams; electric lighting in the streets; telephone kiosks in the squares and a bustle in daily life that we would recognise as essentially modern. That period, in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, is also, of course, a great period for new buildings and change. It followed the dismantling of the old defensive banks and moats that had constrained the city and then the construction, around the city, of important new parks and new public buildings - including the National Gallery, the Glyptotek, the new city hall and, of course, the building that the museum itself now occupies. Many of these new streets and squares were painted by Fischer.
For the composition of his paintings of street life, Fischer made use of photographs that he himself took - so he was an early street photographer - and these are shown alongside many of the paintings so there is an intriguing game to spot which buildings have survived; which have gone in the last ninety or hundred years and which streets and squares have barely changed.
Fischer was also a commercial artist - again in a remarkably modern way - who produced illustrations for advertisements and newspapers and magazines and designs for post cards and an extensive collection of examples are on display.
This is a fascinating exhibition that takes a clever course between exploring and celebrating the work of an accomplished artist but also looks at the record his paintings and photographs have left us of the people who lived in the city and how they used the streets and the buildings in that specific period.
Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in the best possible light
at the Museum of Copenhagen, Storm Gade 18 - the exhibition continues until 31 July 2020
Kids’ City is the big new exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen.
This is essentially an exhibition in two parts.
Around the walls are panels with photographs and assessments that look at recent buildings designed for children - so schools and the new hospitals for children - showing the best of Danish architecture and design and showing what has to be done to create the best possible space for children when they are learning or playing or when they are ill.
However, the main part - literally at the centre of the space - are a series of large structures for children that are a variation on the brilliant playgrounds found around Denmark in public spaces and the courtyards of apartment buildings and in schools where children are encouraged, in the best possible ways, to exercise and to learn through play.
Just watch children playing here and, yes, you begin to see that this is kids having a fantastic time but, much more than that, it is about a huge investment in our future.
This is where and how Danish children learn to take good design for granted but in that process learn that good architecture and the best possible design is a crucial part of their lives. That should establish expectations and nurture an understanding of the role of good design and trigger, we hope, the interest and then the enthusiasm and then the focus that will produce the next generation of great Danish architects and designers.
Kids’ City continues at Danish Architecture Center until 10 May 2020
At the Space10 gallery in the Meat Market, there is a small but interesting exhibition about a new furniture or light-weight construction board made from recycled materials.
Sometimes it is worth looking back at the basic problem before looking at the solution. Some readers will groan and say it is obvious but it helps to look at the problem in order to judge the solution being offered.
People have used timber for building and for making furniture for thousands of years so the techniques of working with wood are well known and well mastered and timber can be - although it is not always - a sustainable material.
The problem, if it is again stating the obvious, is that timber comes in tree sized and branch and tree trunk shaped pieces and people want large (wide and long) and flat and stable materials for, for instance, table tops and cupboard doors.
Wood can be joined by making a raft with narrow strips but this involves glue or pegs or joins such as tongue and groove over long lengths and these composite boards can still twist or warp if the wood is not well seasoned and the boards usually need a thin surface layer such as a veneer to cover all the joins. Block board, of one form or another, as a relatively cheap furniture board, has been manufactured for decades but is heavy.
Thin layers of wood stuck together with glue (plywood) can be stable but works best with good-quality timber ‘peeled’ into these thin layers and again it is heavy to work with and needs some form of edging strip and, with thinner plywood, some form of supporting frame or structure and the edge and cut lines splinter or are jagged if the cutting tools are not sharp.
An alternative is to use wood chips or wood fibre pressed together with glue and often with a wood veneer on the surface but boards are also made with a thin plastic coat (so now questionable) and marketed under different names such as Conti Board. The glues used in the past have been dubious and, again, the material can chip or split or snap when not cut in the right way or if weights are dropped on, say, the end of a table top, and, once damaged, the board absorbs damp or water and swells and disintegrates.
The new board shown at Space 10 is basically a new technique of manufacture. It uses recycled paper, tightly pressed together, to create what is, to put it crudely and very unfairly, corrugated paper on steroids. The board is wide and very smooth on the surface so can be painted with little extra preparation and presumably it could be self coloured. It has a hollow construction with angular longitudinal spaces so, as with well-established fibre boards, the problems are that if it is cut to make shorter pieces then it needs to be cut precisely and with sharp tools and the open edge has to be finished with an edging strip.
It is light weight and there is an ingenious new system with metal joining pieces made from recycled aluminium. Conti Board, for instance, can be used with small interlocking plastic blocks in two parts with each fitted to the main and the cross piece with screws and then the blocks clipped and bolted together. These are relatively strong but are better if they are fixed precisely and are ugly so better hidden from sight on the underside or within the furniture being made. That is not a problem with the Space 10 system where the joins are internal and hidden once the piece is assembled.
The new board shown at Space 10 is shown with photographs of furniture designed by Ransmeier Inc.
By the nature of the board, these are starkly simple forms but it is clearly a good light-weight material and with the right designs could make furniture that can be disassembled and moved easily but again loading, for instance if the board is used for shelves or a table top, could be a problem along with impact damage.
As always, there is a balancing act, in any argument about sustainability …. cheap and simple is good but at what point does cheap and simple become cheap and easily thrown away and replaced and that is now more difficult to justify. At one extreme, an expensive table top with mahogany veneer can have chips and scratches lovingly repaired over centuries of use that can, in part, justify the initial investment and at the other extreme you have a flat table top between trestles where the top can be thrown away and replaced immediately it is damaged. The marketing trick for IKEA is finding a material and techniques of construction that fit somewhere between the two.
Technology and the furniture of tomorrow continues at Space10 until 27 February 2020
A major new exhibition has opened at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen to explore the design of nightclubs and discotheques described as "hotbeds of contemporary culture."
This is about interiors and furniture; about graphics, for posters and record covers; about the development of all the technology needed for sound systems and lighting in these venues and, of course, fashion with contemporary photographs and some outfits and with separate sections on key places through the decades since the early 1960s including Studio 54 in New York; the Hacienda in Manchester and Ministry of Sound in London along with clubs and discotheques in Italy and Berlin.
There are videos - including a long clip from Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta that was released in 1977 - and even a dance floor with music (through headphones) with play lists from early pop disco through house to techno.
The exhibition has been designed and curated by Vitra Design Museum and ADAM - Brussels Design Museum.
NIGHT FEVER. Designing Club Culture 1960-today
continues at Designmuseum Danmark until 27 September 2020
WORKS+WORDS BIENNALE 2019 presents research within the field of architecture in Europe.
This - the second Biennale - is in the main exhibition space at KADK - Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering in their buildings close to the Opera House.
To paraphrase the open invitation from the academy to architecture schools to participate in the exhibition, the Biennale is about contemporary artistic research in Europe that aims to develop new ground in the field of architecture and is characterized by combining the making of works with reflections in words.
Artistic research is defined as the integrated part of an artistic process that leads to an accessible work and is accompanied by intellectual reflection on the process itself as well as the presentation of the finished work.
This means that the visitor is challenged and confronted - it is an exhibition that more than deserves time and effort - but the Biennale is not only about communicating stimulating and, in many cases, complicated ideas that show how architects reassess what we have built and how and why we build but it is also about how architects have to now take on and resolve complex new challenges.
KADK has emphasised that the United Nations sustainable development goals now form a framework to teaching and research at the academy and the invitation to participate in the Biennale asked that the goals should be considered and much of the work explores the impact on society that is a consequence of the research if it is implemented.
Ostensibly, this is an exhibition is about ideas - about theories and proposals and reassessments of accepted maxims and that exploration is expressed in words - but it is also about architects who, as creative people, inevitably express themselves and communicate their ideas visually so here there is a fascinating range of styles for visual presentations from photography to models - one has a paper and cardboard model of a theatre with a cut-out paper audience in the rank of seats but on the screen, in the model, is shown a stop-motion video of how the public moves through and round that space. There are fine prints and drawings here that show that many architects are fine draughtsmen and talented artists and many of the projects show a heightened sense of colour and texture that is too rarely carried over to finished buildings.
These research projects are also a reminder, of course, that architecture is about extraordinary imaginations and about communicating …. about initially getting unique ideas and innovative solutions across to a client or to a collaborator or an assistant or a senior partner or a planner or to the public before any scheme can move on to realisation.
There are 30 research projects presented here and they all redress the too easy perception that modern architecture is now commercially driven and is just an adjunct of engineering, a driving force behind the financial demands of predatory investors in speculative developments and subservient to large-scale and inhuman planning. Here is architecture still as an art and architecture as a discipline close to philosophy and social science and the research here is much more about ways of seeing our built environment …. much more about how we experience, appreciate and move though built space … than about mundane aspects of what we build and how.
written material that accompanies WORKS+WORDS can be downloaded as a pdf file
WORKS+WORDS at KADK,
Danneskiold-Samsøe Allé,
1435 Copenhagen K
28 November 2019 until 19 January 2020
This is a small travelling exhibition produced by a number of regional tourist organisations from Germany to promote the centenary anniversary year of the founding of the Bauhaus.
It was or should have been a good idea … a small simple pavilion transported from city to city to encourage tourists to visit exhibitions and buildings throughout Germany that are marking the achievements of this important design school that had and still has a remarkable influence on design practice and design teaching.
The small pavilion - created by DUS Architects from Amsterdam - is in part digitally printed, and uses materials that can be recycled and, with a foot print of eight square metres, has associated itself with the Tiny House movement so should tick the boxes.
And maybe there is an excuse because it is at the end of a long Europe wide tour because this is the last venue after Paris, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Marseille, Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Belgrade but it was certainly looking tired and worn from its journey.
The design appears to be only vaguely inspired by the Bauhaus - the fake-wood printed plastic lining of the interior seemed particularly inappropriate - and it is stretching it a little to claim that this is an example of Gesamtkunstwerck unless you assume that means simply designing the whole thing rather than meaning designing with care every feature and fitting to make a unified interior or building.
Films shown on the video inside whisked through material - some with avatars of key designers from the school and most changing images so quickly that clearly the aim was to speed ahead of kids with attention deficit disorder - and there were unfortunate phrases in the voice over like mentioning that the school “closed its doors in 1933.”
Printed hand outs from Dessau and Saxony-Annalt have good photographs and well-produced introductions but generally this is an unnecessary distraction from the important exhibition in the design museum itself.
TINY [BAU]HAUS on the road
is on the entrance court of the design museum
from 3 October to 31 October 2019
Designmuseum Danmark has just opened a new display in one of the large side galleries with 70 ceramic vessels from their own collection and described simply as large pots.
They vary in period and in country of origin but most are by Danish potters and artists and most are from the late 19th century onwards although there are also older ceramic vessels from Japan, Korea and China and work from Spain, France and England … all countries with strong but distinct ceramic traditions.
Some of the pieces are clearly storage jars - so utilitarian - but there are also sophisticated decorative vessels and some fine studio pottery.
The size of some of these pots is amazing and the selection of ceramics shown here provides an amazing opportunity to see how the technical skill of the potter; the form or shape of the pot; the choice of smooth, perfect and highly finished surfaces or the decision to leave a more natural finish determined by the character of the clay and the use or not of decoration, incised or in relief; the types of glaze; any use of texture or a preference for a smooth finish or high shine or matt surface and of course the final colour or colours produce works of incredibly diverse styles.
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