CHART ART 2021

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CHART Art Fair at the palace of Charlottenborg - the home of the Danish Royal Academy of Art - is a major event in the city when commercial art galleries from Nordic countries come together to show the work of the contemporary artists they represent.

It is a great social event but this year seems particularly important as pandemic restrictions in the city have just been lifted and Copenhagen returns to a semblance of normality.

There are always subsidiary shows at galleries around the city but also two main events run in parallel. CHART Architecture is a competition for architects, designers and studios to produce pavilions that are constructed in the two main courtyards of Charlottenborg and are used as venues where visitors can buy food and drink and, an inaugural event, CHART Book Fair, will be held in Festsalen - the hall over the entrance to Charlottenborg.

There is an extensive programme of performances and talks through the three days that the fair is open to the public.

In recent years a design fair, CHART Design, has been held at the gallery of Den Frie at Østerport. This was not part of the programme this year but hopefully it will return in the future.

our times? a photograph of a photographer photographing people being photographed

 
 

CHART art fair opening

26 August: Preview -
by invitation only 11-18

27 August: 11-19
28 August: 11-18
29 August: 11-17

CHART Art 2021

 

Koloristerne 2021 at Den Frie

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With restrictions because of the pandemic, all galleries and museums in the city are closed and the major show of works by Koloristerne - The Colourists - at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Arts has been cancelled but if the public cannot go into the gallery then the artists can bring some of their works to the exterior of the building.

Carsten von Würden, chairman of the Colorists, says about the project:

“Several studies have recently indicated that what we especially miss here in the closure is art and culture. The physical encounter with art cannot be replaced by a screen. Eventually we are also so tired of the screen all together, so with this manifestation we artists would like to give people the opportunity to have a physical encounter with art! We are therefore super happy to be able to give everyone who comes past Oslo Plads an art experience in a good safe environment outdoors, with a group of Denmark's most talented painters! ”

continues until 21st February 2021 at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Arts,
Oslo Plads, Copenhagen

KOLERISTERNE
DEN FRIE

 

Members of Koloristerne:
Søren Ankarfeldt, Eli Benveniste, Martin Berge, Asger Harbou Gjerdevik,  Jørgen Teik Hansen, Nanna Hertoft, Ingvald Holmefjord, Ida Kvetny, Anker Mortensen, Lisbeth Nielsen, Niels Reumert, Hartmut Stockter, Kurt Tegtmeier, Helle Thorborg, Inge Lise Westman, Maria Wæhrens og Carsten von Würden.

Invited guests:
Christina Hamre, Signe Jais, Jacob Oksbjerg, Esben Klemann, Michael Norre, Lærke Lauta, Jean Marc Routhier,
Sophus Ejler Jepsen, David Noro, Anne Torpe, Jon Pilkington, Søren Sejr, Anne Sofie Meldgaard og Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen.

 

a Copenhagen Ponte Vecchio?

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For now, Copenhagen has its own version of the Ponte Vecchio …. even if it is only painted onto a tarpaulin.

Nyhavnsbroen - the bridge at the centre of Nyhavn - is being restored by Københavns Kommune … ironwork parapets on both sides are being stripped of old paint, repairs made and sections replaced and then the iron repainted in a stylish dark grey that has a deep sheen rather than gloss finish.

Nyhavn - or new harbour - was constructed in the 1670s but the first bridge across the centre was not built until 1874 and was in wood and the present bridge only dates from 1912. For those first two hundred years it was the tall masted sailing ships that came into the harbour to load and unload goods that were the priority and any bridge would have been an impediment.

The new harbour is a wide canal that runs back for about 420 metres from the main harbour so, on foot, it was relatively easy to go up to Kongens Nytorv - the large market square at the top of the harbour - and back down the other side if you wanted to get from one quay to the other.

In fact the two sides were rather distinct with city merchants in houses and warehouses on the north side and Charlottenborg - a royal palace - and the naval ship yards of Bremerholm - now Gammelholm - on the south side. There was probably little need to move from one side of Nyhavn to the other.

Toldbodgade, running away from the harbour on the north side, dates from the 1670s, when the area was established, and several timber-framed buildings from that period survive in that street, but Holbergsgade, running away from the harbour from the south end of the bridge, was only a main through road from the 1870s onwards when the dockyards were finally closed and the area was laid out with new streets and new apartment buildings so it was only at that stage that a bridge over Nyhavn became necessary.

The bridge was renovated in 1960 and then again in 1993. In the current work, the side towards the main harbour was repaired first and now the substantial scaffolding - erected to protect the workers and to contain dirt and water as the ironwork is pressure cleaned - has been moved to the inner side towards Kongens Nytorv although there the painted tarpaulin does not fit quite so well.

It has become popular to fix padlocks to the bridge with the names of couples scrawled on them in felt tip but following the cleaning this will no longer be allowed as the situation had got completely out of hand … over 5,000 locks were removed before repairs could start.

The scaffolding on the side towards the main harbour was dismantled over a Saturday so that it could be moved to the inner side for work to start there on Monday. By 10am on the Sunday morning the first new love locks on the new paintwork had appeared. Crazy.

looking across Nyhavnsbroen towards Toldbodsgade with the scaffolding and the painted tarpaulin over the parapet on the side of the bridge towards the main harbour

 

if the painted tarpaulin is a Ponte Vecchio on the cheap then this is the eternal love of Romeo and Juliet but the cheap version …. everlasting love for the price of a lock for 70 kroner - this first lock appeared by 10am on the morning after the scaffold was dismantled to be moved to the other parapet

 

Flanøren / the flaneur

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The new Museum of Copenhagen in Stormgade opened in February and has separate galleries or rooms for each of the distinct periods that together make the city what it has become …. the periods of construction and expansion that, together, explain the stages through which the city developed.

Space in the museum is good but certainly not limitless so objects from the collection in the different displays have been selected with care because they have to explain their part in a clear but sometimes fragmented story about important events and different periods of growth and of change. 

In one of the upper rooms there is a display about the city in the late 19th century with a large model of the new city hall at the centre … a building that was finished around 1905. This was the period after the ramparts and the gates of the old city were dismantled, so it was a period when the city began to expand outwards and the number of people living here increased rapidly. It was also a period of amazing developments in technology and in manufacturing … a period when trams appeared in the city and telephones and flushing toilets … a period when their lifestyle then seems familiar and not actually that different from our own lives now.

This particular part of the story of Copenhagen has been told by focusing on eight types or characters or professions from that period. People who have been chosen to represent the ways in which life was changing.

They include the Tram conductor; the Kiosk attendant; the Architect and the Engineer … so that's two jobs that were new in the city and two increasingly-important professions. There is also the part of the story of life in the city that is told through The Child because so many schools were built in this period and it was when education became available for more people and changed more and more lives. There is Cyclisten - or the cyclist - representing both new popular transport but also to show that this was a period with more leisure time for more people, and there is Kanonfotografen or the street photographer and Flanøren.

 
 

For fairly obvious reasons the last two - Kanonfotografen and Flanøren - were of particular interest ………

By profession I'm an architectural historian and a social historian but, throughout my career, looking at photographs and taking photographs have been essential parts of my work … so, taking photographs as a record; using historic photographs as important and reliable evidence that document change and using carefully-selected photographs to get across information in books and exhibitions and lectures. But I would not describe myself as a street photographer even though now I spend much of my time in the street taking photographs.

There are two types of street photographer covered by that broad term:

The first - and the focus in the museum in the gallery about the late 19th century - could be described as commercial photographers who took their studio to their customers and often, but not always, with a mobile dark room. They were taking pictures of people in the street who wanted their photographs taken - or were persuaded by the photographer that they wanted to have their picture taken. Street photographers produced the outdoor version of the studio portrait.

Until I saw the camera in the museum, and the background information with it, I had not understood just how quickly street photographers became common in the city or just how popular they were right through to the 1960s. There is one view of the square in front of the city hall that appears to show at least three cameras set up so trade must have been good and clearly, for many visitors, part of a good day out in Copenhagen was to have a photo taken.

Presumably, some of these photographers moved across to using polaroid cameras but as these became cheaper, and people could afford their own Polaroid camera to take their own instant pictures, and then, as Polaroid cameras were, in turn, replaced by cheaper and cheaper digital cameras and then phone cameras, these street photographers disappeared.

Of course, where they have resurfaced is with the photographers who work the fashionable streets of cities like New York or London or Milan and take pictures of people on the street because of their clothes or their style and then post the images to Instagram …. but that’s another story.

The second type of street photographer in Copenhagen were the photographers who photographed the streets and of the buildings and of life on the streets in the city and their works can be seen throughout the museum.

Some were taking photographs of the new streets and new buildings or of the historic buildings for books or for magazines or to sell as prints or for popular postcards and major events in the city were photographed - particularly for newspapers. Some photographers where taking photographs to document and to reveal social situations or social interactions and would now be described as a photo journalist rather than as a street photographer.

One of the first and perhaps the greatest of the early photographers to record everyday and more mundane aspects of life in a city was the French photographer Eugène Atget, who, working in Paris, took photographs of unlikely subjects like alleyways or shop windows or piles of old clothes in second-hand shops. There were also major American photographers like Paul Strand and then Walker Evans, who recorded the reality of the life of the poor. They would not have described themselves as street photographers but that was where they worked.

The Danish photographer Jacob Riis was actually eight years older than Atget. Initially, he was a journalist but then became a photographer and is now described as a documentary photographer. Riis emigrated to New York when he was just 21 and worked there rather than in Denmark so I am not sure how much his work influenced photographers working here but certainly there are amazing photographs in the city archive that record the slums and the alleys of the city that have long gone so photographers in Copenhagen were not simply interested in polite and middle-class subjects.

Kongens Nytorv ….
photographs taken around 1900

above all,
these photographs show just
how much space
cars need and take

the photographs
are from the City Archive

 

street camera
in the Museum of Copenhagen

 

not all the old photographs of Copenhagen are of the affluent streets and squares - this is Adelgade where the old house were deemed to be slums and were demolished in the 1950s

At first I was perplexed by that word Flanøren until I read the information panel where it explained that it comes from the French flâneur … a word translated as loafer if you want to be rude or, in some dictionaries a flâneur is defined as “an elegant idler” which is marginally more polite but not much more.

And they were mostly young men that you see in the photographs. Apparently, they had also called themselves Boulevardiers so obviously they strolled backwards and forwards along the fashionable streets and through the squares of Copenhagen seeing and being seen. It is fascinating that this was clearly a time when anything French had to be good …. from the boulevards to the mansard roof.

I realised that I spend much of my time walking up and down the streets of Copenhagen to take photographs but I don't think anyone would call me elegant - idler maybe - but elegant no unless it was with irony. 

Kongens Nytorv by Paul Fischer

 
 

Both the paintings and the photographs by the Danish artist Paul Fischer - he took photographs as a first stage for composing his paintings - show how the public space of the streets and the squares then played an important part in everyday life in Copenhagen and, significantly, well over a century later, the way that people in the city use the public space of the streets and the squares continues in much the same way.

Walk along Sønder Boulevard - particularly on a Friday evening after work or on a sunny Sunday afternoon - and you'd probably assume that the large number of people sitting outside and the number of children playing and the number of people using the sports courts or exercise equipment there must all be part of a relatively recent Copenhagen - a Copenhagen with much more leisure time - but, actually, using public space for exercise and for socialising has a strong and well-established history.

Copenhagen was tightly constricted by the city ramparts and even in the 16th century it must have felt crowded …. after all, the first deliberate expansion of the city was with the building of Christianshavn in the early 17th century.

Certainly through the 18th century and the 19th century, it must have felt as if everyone was living on top of each other. Through to the 1860s, when the ramparts and gates were dismantled, houses and people were tightly packed together. Over the centuries, because the city could not expand out beyond the defences, garden plots and courtyards were built over and if you look at older houses that survived the numerous fires then you can see that most started with two floors or two main floors with basements and attics but over the years nearly all of them had extra floors added so they were enlarged to three and then four and finally five floors of apartments. And, as now, if an old and low house was demolished then what replaced it was inevitably taller.

Even after the ramparts were removed and the city was able to breath … imagine taking off a tight corset after three centuries … it was not the end of densely packed housing. The new districts of Nørrebro and Vesterbro were built outside the ramparts but both areas had and still have some of the most densely-packed areas of housing in Europe. That's one reason why the public space of Sønder Boulevard, running across the south side of Vesterbro, is now so important for the people who live in the area.

It is hardly surprising that people in the city took over the streets and the squares and the wide roads immediately inside the ramparts and walked on the broad path on top of the ramparts as places to exercise and socialise. The King's Garden was opened to the public in the late 18th century and citizens have been using it ever since. Families stroll through the cemeteries in the city at weekends and there are traditions for taking the first walk in the Spring around the ramparts of Kastellet or taking a Sunday walk along Langelinie to look out across the Sound. Even Tivoli seems to be as much about walking and talking and sitting and drinking as it is about rides and thrills.

If Coronavirus has proved one thing it's that it's hard to keep Copenhagen indoors.

Paul Fischer (1860-1934)
self portrait (above) and
one of his photographs of
Kongens Nytorv in the snow

Fischer did not paint the gritty reality of life in Copenhagen around 1900 but, generally, the life of the middle classes although there are studies of flower sellers and market traders

 

Nyhavn - what a difference a year and a virus makes

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last summer ……

…… and this summer with the city in lockdown

and a slightly lighter note …. when it comes to important things in life, people don’t change much. Who can resist leaning on the railings or the parapet of a bridge to stare at the water?

The lads fishing from the north bridge over the moat at Kastellet is a detail of a painting by Christen Købke from 1834 and is now in the collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The stance of the boy in pale trousers fishing and the pose of the girl in jeans and both with remarkably similar short jackets seems like a link through the decades between them.

 

museums and galleries online

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Museums and galleries in the city are closed but, unless the situation changes and there are new instructions from the government, then the plan, at the moment, seems to be that they will reopen after 13th April.

For many of the museums and galleries this has meant that important temporary exhibitions have closed.

Some of the museums and galleries have boosted the material on their online sites so Designmuseum Danmark now has a Digital Guide; the site for Statens Museum for Kunst, The National Gallery in Copenhagen, has a new site SMK.OPEN and already had an amazing online catalogue of major works where you are welcome to download high-resolution images and the Louisiana Channel, from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, is a brilliant resource.

Designmuseum Danmark
Statens Museum for Kunst
SMK.OPEN
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Statens Museum for Kunst
Portrait of the Copperplate Engraver CE Sonne circa 1826
by Ditlev Blunck

the images on line have a brief text with information about the artist and their period to put the work in context …. select this image and that will take you to the gallery page and from there you can explore the collection

 

Anna Ancher - retrospective exhibition at Statens Museum for Kunst

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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

 
 
 

Paul Fischer - Copenhagen in the best possible light

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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

 

OPTUR - a new exhibition at the A Petersen Gallery

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A Petersen Collection & Craft, Kløvermarksvej 70, Copenhagen

A joint exhibition with the work of the artist and designer Leise Dich Abrahamsen and her brother the cabinetmaker and conservator Teis Dich Abrahamsen.

the exhibition continues
at A Petersen Collection & Craft
until 29 March 2020

gingham - furniture under wraps

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A major exhibition on art in Denmark in the first half of the 19th century - the period described as the Golden Age of Danish art - has just opened at Statens Museum for Kunst / The National Gallery in Copenhagen.

It sets the paintings in the context of the political history of a period bookended by war and looks at the influence of the Royal Academy; at teaching; at the influence of travel as Danish artists went abroad, to Italy in particular, and looks at how the artists lived and worked … with paintings and drawings of artists at work in their studios.

The exhibition is an opportunity to look at paintings as a record of life in the city through that period, with paintings that record interiors and streetscapes that have gone or have been changed dramatically.

This painting by Martinus Rørbye from 1827 shows his teacher, The Painter Christian August Lorentzen and is on loan for the exhibition from the Nivagaard Collection.

Note the old arm chair that appears to have been covered originally in green silk but by the time it has been moved to the studio of the artist it appears to be permanently covered in its gingham slip covers.

In England, through the 18th century and at this period in the first half of the 19th century, wealthy landowners spent time away from their main houses in the country and, often for many months, lived in houses in London or they travelled “for the season” to cities like Bath or Harrogate or even to the seaside at Brighton, and when they were elsewhere, their homes were shut up and expensive furniture was usually protected with slip covers in calico or heavy cotton - often in gingham. There could even be long thin bags in the material that were drawn up around heavy silk curtains and secured at the top with tapes or plain ribbons. Presumably, in Denmark, the wealthy followed the same or similar habits of housekeeping but as silk covers got dirty or frayed - silk splits or breaks apart with strong sunlight - then these temporary covers that had been made to fit the specific chair, would have become more practical as permanent covers.

Note the construction of the chair with low-set and staggered stretchers between the legs … set higher at the front, where you tuck your feet back under as you stand up, and at the back than at the sides so the legs are not made weaker by putting the mortices for the ends of the stretchers too close together. The L-shaped arm rest is a crude precursor of the ‘classic’ mid 20th-century chair by Ole Wanscher.

The fur-lined leather slippers are fantastic.

Danish Golden Art - World-class art between disasters continues at
Statens Mueum for Kunst in Copenhagen
until 8 December 2019

detail of the painting by Matrinus Rørbye of The Painter Christian August Lorentzen

 
 

note:

Gingham is a distinct material with a small pattern of squares that is created in the weave and is generally in strong simple colours so red and white or blue and white or strong, deep yellow and white squares. It is popular throughout Scandinavia and, along with simple stripe patterns, gingham is probably most often used for curtains and covers in rural homes such as summer cottages or farmhouses.

World-class art between disasters

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A major exhibition on Danish Art from the Golden Age has just opened at Statens Museum for Kunst - the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen.

The intriguing title is a reference to major events in Denmark in the 19th-century with the period bookended by the bombardment of the city by the British Navy in September 1807 and the war with Germany that ended in 1864 with the loss of extensive Danish territory in Schleswig Holstein. Both were dramatic and traumatic events that forced the country to reassess it’s position in the World.

For art in Denmark, this period is considered to be a Golden Age .

Danish Design Review rarely reviews exhibitions of paintings or sculpture but many of these artists recorded in considerable detail topographical scenes, interiors and social life that provide significant evidence for the development of design and architecture through the period.

Danish Golden Age - World-class art between disasters
continues at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen
until 8 December 2019

 
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citizens fleeing to Amager as Copenhagen is bombarded by the British navy in September 1807
by CW Eckersberg (1783-1853)

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Højbro Plads in Copenhagen 1844
by Sally Henriques (1815-1866)

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detail of A Wounded Danish Warrior 1865
by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1819-1881)

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street scene
by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853)

L1055009.JPG

detail of a painting of the square of the Marble Church in 1835
by Frederik Sødring (1809-1862)

 
 

There I Belong at Statens Museum for Kunst

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There I Belong is the first in a new series of exhibitions under the title SMK Plus where contemporary artists will explore the collections of the National Gallery.

For this exhibiion - Inspired by the works of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi who lived and worked in Copenhagen around 1900 - the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated with Marianne Torp and Tone Bonnén, the museum's curators of contemporary art.

Spartan interiors by Hammershøi are restrained and calm but they are enigmatic - paintings that tread a fine line between being self contained or depictions of a life of painful isolation. The paintings resonate with a contemporary audience, reflecting aspects of modern taste and restrained Scandinavian interiors.

There may be windows in these rooms but the view out to a world beyond is usually obscured by thin, translucent curtains … the natural light entering the room is crucial but a sense of place not so because these are studies in light but never put people, objects or place under a harsh spot light. Figures in the paintings are detached, generally absorbed in what they are doing, inward looking, often with their back to the viewer and in many of the paintings we do not even know if they are reading or writing or simply sitting with head bowed in quiet contemplation. Open doors indicate that there are rooms beyond but barely hint at a lived life.

Interior with the Artist's Easel, takes this to an extreme because, when painting the picture, the artist himself should be at the easel. The only conclusion has to be that there is a second easel at the point where the viewer is standing so are we the artist? Perhaps we have been co-opted into this quiet and private world but this is the ultimate antidote to that modern scourge - the selfie - where the photographer shows themselves at the centre of the scene, always the subject of the view, inevitably relegating an event or scene beyond to a secondary role.

The second gallery - a large space - shows the work Powerless Structures (8 doors) by Elmgreen & Dragset from 2000-2002. These are the most simple, basic, standard white doors imaginable, with plain white door frames but each is a variation in a theme of a detachment from the real or the functional … one door has handles and hinges on both the left and the right side so it would be impossible to open - another has a handle that is not on the door but on the wall alongside so it might or might not open - one door is slightly open to reveal a locked door immediately behind - one door is folded and wrapped around the corner of the gallery - a pair of doors on adjoining walls at another corner are separate but linked by a security chain as if someone might be able to squeeze through from a room on one side to another room without being able to get into the gallery.

This work, or a version of this work, was shown at Statens Museum for Kunst in 2015 in Biography - an ambitious set of major installations by Elmgreen & Dragset. Then, the doors were part of a corridor and a series of rooms that were in what appeared to be a government or public office building. If not obviously dystopian then the corridor was completely anonymous and designed to smother any sense of self. On entering you had a choice to go one way or the other but with no signs or notices to say where you were or why you were there although you could get a ticket from a machine to wait for your number to be called but it never would be, of course, and if you proceeded past these doors you could only return to where you started.

By now placing these doors on the four walls of a large gallery, the work takes yet another step back and pays homage to Hammershøi but expands his space until it is monumental in scale.

The exhibition includes photographs, paintings, sculptures and video by other artists - all taking the theme of doorways and spartan anonymity - with works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lilianna Maresca, Francesca Woodman, Robert Gober, Annika von Hausswolff, Ugo Rondinone and Thomas Ruff. Only the work by von Hausswolff is from the museum collection with the other works either courtesy of the artist or on loan from galleries and private owners.

 

the exhibition at Statens Museum for Kunst / The National Gallery in Copenhagen
continues until 1 September 2019

Interior with a young woman sweeping, 1899

Interior, No 30 Strandgade, 1906-1908

Interior with the Artist’s Easel, 1910

Copenhagen Contemporary - summer exhibitions 2

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Lengua Llorona

Donna Huanca

22 March to 1 September 2019

Donna Huanca grew up in Chicago. Her parents are Bolivian and she studied in Houston, in Maine at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Städelschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt and she now lives and works in Berlin. This is her first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.

The title, Lengua Llorona, means ‘crying tongue’.

There are sixteen oil paintings on a monumental scale, set away from the gallery walls and at angles to create secondary spaces as you move around the works, and smaller painted-steel sculptures - cut out in complex silhouettes - are set in front of or alongside the larger works. Colour bleeds on to the walls in places and areas of white sand across the floor are shaped and moulded with delicate ephemeral patterns, so this site-specific show occupies the space in an intriguing and very complex way.

Through the gallery there is the scent of Palo Santo - from a holy South American tree and used for cleansing rituals.

There will be a seres of eight performances in the exhibition space during the exhibition period with models decorated with paint and textiles as living paintings.

 
 

The exhibition has been curated by Aukje Lepoutre Ravn and performance dates are listed on the gallery site.

Copenhagen Contemporary

 
 

Seizure -
The Needle and the Larynx
Faint with Light

Marianna Simnett

Copenhagen Contemporary 8 February to 26 May 2019

This is the first solo exhibition in Scandinavia by the London based artist and is performance art without the artist present as Marianna Simnett is central to both works.

I found the Needle and the Larynx disturbing but that is a confession and not a criticism because a key role of the artist is to challenge our perceptions and easy complacency. The uneasiness was not because I am queasy about needles - I am not - but this is presented as the grimmest of a Grimme’s style fairy story told as a voice over about a young girl who threatens and punishes a surgeon because she wants him to make her voice deeper. The film is of Simnett herself having Botox injected into her larynx to stiffen the vocal chord so that the vocal range is restricted and the voice drops. It is actually that disjunction between the tale, performed like a black bed-time story, and the clinical calm of the injection process that seems shocking.

Faint with light is in a separate gallery - a darkened space where a bank of long light tubes set horizontally respond to the breathing pattern of the artist as she hyperventilates until she faints when the breathing becomes slow and calm and the light patterns subside. The effect is hypnotic and very powerful … the effect of hyperventilating is obvious both in the sound track and in the visual light patterns but here there is absolutely no story or narrative so no reasons are given … this is a highly dramatic act of sound combined with the most simple and abstract use of space and light that again sets up a challenging disjunction. Here it is perhaps not the act itself - of collapse and recovery - that is shocking but that this is on a never-ending loop. There is no respite.

Seizure at Copenhagen Contemporary

Margrethe Kaas at Design Werck

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An exhibition has just opened at Design Werck in Copenhagen of paintings and sculptures by the Danish architect and artist Margrethe Kaas. The gallery space at Design Werck has beautiful light in space where furniture and decorative arts are also shown.

Margrethe Kaas was given her first set of paints at the age of four and painting has, for her, been a major vehicle for exploring colour. The large-scale colour studies show an architectural sense of planes and space and there are also topographic studies including here painting from visits to New York and London and a painting to reflect the colours and energy of Berlin.

the exhibition continues at Design Werck through to 31 March 2019

Margrethe Kaas
Design Werck

well-known Copenhagen landmark could be under threat.

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The image of a girl on a bicycle on the gable of a building in Nørrebro was painted in 1993 by the Finnish artist Seppo Mattinen who was born in 1930.

Apparently the building is now owned by a relatively new housing association and they do not have the funds to restore or maintain the painting. Unfortunately, it has been vandalised several times so keeping the painting does mean quite a substantial and ongoing financial commitment. In a prominent location just before the lakes as you head into the city, it would certainly be missed by many if it cannot be kept.

update:

latest news is a proposal to take down the painting and move it to a new site

Gable art-6.jpg

new metro hoardings

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Around the city, the final stages of work on the new metro line means that the high hoardings around the engineering works for new stations have come down and work on new paving and hard landscaping has started but the extension of the metro out to the south harbour is not due to open until 2024. 

New hoardings have gone up around the site of the new station at Enghave Brygge and the paintings, in 12 sections on the theme of Evolution, are pretty amazing extending for nearly 500 metres … said to be the longest continuous graffiti in Europe.

The artists are Ulrik Schiødt, Peter Skensved, Michael Wisniewski og Caligr Oner står bag rekordmaleriet med deltagelse fra graffitikunstnerne Balstrøm, Welin, Sabe, Crema, Tonek, Toms, Name, Debs, Code, More, Then, Dae og Even.

 

farve form stof / colour form texture

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detail of 1025 Farben by Gerhard Richter 1974
Parrhesia, sculpture in papier mâché by Franz West 2012
and, in the background Para 1 by Morris Louis 1959

 

Works in this exhibition are drawn from the collection and they mark major themes in art since the Second World War looking at the use of vibrant colour that has an immediate impact and at the exploration of texture and of forms for sculpture that step well beyond realism or, rather, look beyond the realistic depiction of colours and shapes and forms from the natural world.

The exhibition in the lower galleries looks at two other major themes from art from the middle of the 20th century onwards … men and masculinity and war and conflict.


the exhibition farve form stof continues until 21 October 2018
at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gammel Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk