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The Cabinetmakers' Autumn Exhibition has just opened in the Golden Gallery at
the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen.
first photographs and basic information about the works
the exhibition opened on 8 November 2019 and continues until 3 May 2020
Danish Architecture Center, Bryghuspladsen 10, 1473 Copenhagen
S.E. Snedkernes Efterårsudstilling 2019
8 November 2019 - 3 May 2020
The annual Cabinetmakers' Autumn exhibition has just opened at BLOX in the Golden Gallery of the Danish Architecture Centre.
There are thirty-five works by cabinetmakers, some who have both designed and made the furniture but most are a collaboration between cabinetmakers and designers or architects working together. Each year the furniture reflects a theme and this year the focus is on climate change and sustainability so there are experiments with new materials; designs that reassess how established materials are used and could be re-used and there are designs that focus on reworking ideas to make them relevant to the way we have to live now and how we may live in the near future.
These works are about makers understanding their chosen material to explore ideas and explore limits and potential but also about producing beautiful and simple furniture of the very highest quality. After all, for most people the easiest form of sustainability is to buy something we need but that then we don't want to throw away.
The furniture is shown on a framework of scaffolding that can itself be reused after the exhibition is dismantled.
review to follow
Snedkernes Efterårsudstilling
Danish Architecture Center
designed by Monique Engelund and Mathilde Witt Mølholm
produced by Anton Balle A/S
designed by Jonas Herman Pedersen
produced by Holstebro Kartonnage
designed by Cecilie Manz
produced by TAKT
This week will be the last chance to see the exhibition of the furniture by cabinetmakers shown in the amazing interiors of Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen
the exhibition continues until 9 December 2018
Thorvaldsens Museum,
Bertel Thorvaldsens Plads 2, 1213 Copenhagen
The catalogue for the Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition in 2018 at Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen has a general introduction to the exhibition by the selection board and then for each work there is a double-page layout with a full page black and white photograph for each of the works.
These monochrome images are dramatic and chime with the theme of the exhibition but also give a strong emphasis to the form of each work.
Some pieces have a descriptive or evocative name - so Calm or Look don’t touch and a cabinet for the display of special possessions has the title Ego - while other titles are more straightforward, with works described as Chair or Table and Chair.
Of course the catalogue sets out the name of the designer and the name of the cabinetmaker or the company who realised the work and each entry includes the materials and the dimensions of the piece.
There is also a short paragraph on each work to set out any thoughts that inspired the design or to talk about technical details - many of the pieces use material in an innovative way or the construction is much more complicated than is immediately apparent - and there is a translation in English.
Graphic design is by Studio Claus Due and the black and white photographs were taken by Torben Petersen.
Snedkernes Efterårsudstilling / The Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition 2018
It has been announced that the venue this year for the Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition will be the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.
Each year the committee choses a theme for the works and this year it will be MONO with works to explore the ideas of monochrome; monologue or monolithic to create furniture that “individually and collectively express a rhythmic narrative and simple whole.”
Thorvaldsen’s Museum, on the north side of Christiansborg, was designed by the architect Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll and completed in 1848 to provide an appropriate building to house and display the work of the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. With the galleries arranged around a central courtyard, the rooms have a striking and rich colour scheme that formed a background to the neo-classical figures in the collection.
The furniture in the Autumn Exhibition will use one of the eight colours used in the decoration of the building or will be in the natural colour of the wood used.
I went back to Side by Side Outside - the Cabinetmakers’ Autumn Exhibition at the design museum - to take a few more photographs and I realised that several of the pieces had footprints on them and not the small footprints of children but large so adolescent or even adult prints … and not just on the low pieces but someone had clearly stepped on to on side of the bench and table by Frama and then up onto the table and down the other side.
Why?
Look at the work. These are beautifully and carefully made and OK this is a garden - which is actually no excuse - but it’s an enclosed courtyard garden within the museum. Each of those footprints had paid to come in … so these were people who, presumably, wanted to be in the design museum … so does paying for a ticket confer some sort of right to be thoughtless?
What was strange was that in some ways the opposite was also a problem. The design brief for the cabinetmakers had been to produce works that encouraged people to interact with the furniture and interact with each other through and around the works. But some visitors were curiously circumspect and several, when I tried to take a photograph of them, leapt up and looked guilty or asked me if I thought it was all right that they were sitting on something in the exhibition.
Watch the film that accompanies the exhibition and you begin to understand just how much thought and effort and how many hours went into the works shown here so, at the very least, walking over the works shows a phenomenal lack of respect. At times I just don't understand and at times I despair.
This was the first day of the Cabinetmakers’ Autumn exhibition at Designmuseum Danmark.
It was raining and cold and the leaves are turning but it didn’t matter. In fact it meant I had the garden of the museum to myself.
For me this annual exhibition - to show the work of the cabinetmakers - is always one of the best exhibitions of the year. It never fails to challenge or delight or make you look at a material or a form or a convention in a different or new way.
In a city where there is so much good architecture and so much great design, it is actually this exhibition that comes closest to summing up what this site is about - about looking at and taking photographs of and writing about those works where imagination; the ability to translate an idea into a working and feasible design; a command of the materials being used and the skill of the craftsman or the quality of manufacturing - all come together.
A full review to follow ASAP
Side by side outside continues at Designmuseum Danmark until 5 November 2017
An astounding exhibition that highlights the huge skill and the boundless and seemingly immeasurable inventiveness of Danish furniture makers and designers. Except of course highlighting is not exactly the appropriate word here as the theme of the exhibition this year is the black line on paper - the draft - and the full title of the exhibition is Pitch Black - shadows and transparency.
Norm Architects have been responsible, as they were last year, for the overall design and arrangement of the exhibition, but have moved away from the mirror glass and complex reflected light of Øregård, last year’s venue, and created a dramatic setting of shadows and mystery: the works are shown over the two main floors of the 17th-century brewhouse building with windows covered to exclude all natural light and the massive posts and beams of the structure and the huge sculptures that are permanently here are sunk in gloom. The shadows appear palpable and become a significant part of the display.
The forty-eight designs cover an amazing range of styles and explore the potential of many very different materials, from leather to Corian, but above all it is the form and shape of pieces and how they occupy space that is explored most strongly. Perhaps the only problem is that it is difficult to appreciate fully the quality of the craftsmanship and the novelty and imagination used in the diverse techniques of joining, overlapping, finishing and forming the pieces.
photographs of all the furniture
the exhibition Pitch Black continues at the
Lapidarium of Kings, Christian IV’s Brewhouse, Copenhagen
until 30th October 2016
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