Alone in the world

Stockholm is the most amazing city when it comes to photo exhibitions. Obviously the city in itself is amazing too – that goes without saying - but the amount of museums and galleries focusing on photography is much bigger than I am used to from Copenhagen. And as a cherry on top, some of them are free!

One good example of that is Kulturhuset, where you can right now see works by Gregory Crewdson. Creepiness and loneliness are pretty much the feelings you get when seeing these photographs. Make no mistake they are intriguing - yet you feel like you’ve entered a scary movie.

This one (above) really stayed with me for a long time after. The woman on a bed looking at a small naked baby. I wonder if the child is dead or alive... why is the door open and what is it about the woman that is so disturbing?
This series of photos is called 'Beneath the roses' and really looks like movie stills. You feel the tension in these shots.


Feel the light

Another thing that is striking about these photographs is the lighting and way it captures the weather. You can almost smell the cold of the snow or feel the damp rain and through that the loneliness of these landscapes and people also creeps out.
These everyday-like environments from small-town America also remind me of motives in Edward Hopper the American painter from the 1930s-40s. The feeling of emptiness and loneliness are also created through light in Hopper's paintings. For example this one 'Summer Evening' from 1947.
But the feeling of something lurking beneath this extremely well polished surface is strong in Crewdson's photos and I guess what get's under you skin.

 

Queer in the church

Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre is one of my favourite contemporary art museums in the city. Located in the old church Saint Nikolaj right in the middle of the city, just behind the main walking street Strøget, it has such a clam and secluded space which gives the art experience a certain clam and ease I haven’t found anywhere else. On a hot summer day it is a cool place to slip in to and they almost always have really interesting exhibitions.

These days the city is filled with homo sports fans as we are hosting the World Outgames 2009. For this occasion Nikolaj has put on a really interesting exhibition about memory and history in relation to gender and sexuality. The exhibition is called 'Lost and Found Queerying the Archive' and it combines many different works from international artists.

One of them is the artist called Cecillia Barriga who in her work Two Queens has taken two of Hollywood silent cinema's biggest stars Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich in each of their signature roles and put them together in a 'fake' on screen lesbian love affair.

I made Nikolaj place of the month because it's such a special place both for it's art and the actual historical feeling the building has. It is one of the oldest churches in Copenhagen- originally from the 1200s I think and it has survived wars, fires and its tower can be seen in the city skyline everywhere, even though the actual chuch is really small.

Victorian Christmas in Copenhagen

I’m crazy about Christmas. It is I guess my rebound after hating the dark Danish winters so much. I especially love Copenhagen around Christmas – the old part of town can completely set me back in time and I forget all my depressing thoughts and feel like I part of a H.C. Andersen-fairytale. I always seek the traditional Danish Christmas decorations and the moods in Copenhagen, which are not difficult to find. Especially if you walk around Strædet in the evening, just past Gamel Torv - here you can easily disappear and pretend that you're back in the 1800s Copenhagen and might just run into H.C.A. himself.

Place of the month in December is The Victorian Home. I went there today for the first time and I think every one in this city should pay it a visit. It is a complete apartment as it looked in 1890 with the original interior. It is part of The National Museum and they only have limited guided tours making it a very unique experience. As you walk around the halls of this amazing place, you hear the story of the family, who lived there from the 1890s up until the 1960s until the apartment was given to The National Museum.
And this time of year it is especially charming as the apartment is decorated with an old traditional Danish Christmas tree.

Berliner attack

She’s back! Nerd Girl has now returned from her vacation in Berlin.This is a wonderful city, where the drinks are cheap and everything is much more laid back than in Copenhagen. As much as I love my own town, it tends to be a bit stock up and too pretentious.
Berliners don’t care about what others think about them – Copenhageners care too much, in my opinion. Anyway, Berlin is a great place to relax and enjoy life,which I did.

I attended a beautiful photo exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau of Man Ray and Alexander Rodschenko. It was two different exhibitions, but they were each very interesting and again reminded me how much I enjoy black and white photography. Man Ray of course is famous for his artistic compositions with faces and bodies, contrasts of shapes and shades.

I had never heard of Alexander Rodschenko before, but his work turned out to be just as interesting, though very different from Man Ray. He works with photo collages and had especially portrayed workers during the Russian revolution.

Home of Finn Juhl

Place of the month May:
In this positively amazing summer weather I can’t find any good excuses to stay inside anymore. So I made my first ever visit to the Ordrupgaard museum north of Copenhagen.

The garden there is lovely and the mix of the original building with the new one is interesting and beautiful.
Right next to Ordrupgaard is the house and home of Danish designer and architect Finn Juhl who died in 1989. His home is a part of Ordrupgaard and it’s open to the public. I’ve made it the place of the month in May because it is such a cool experience to see his home. He has built and designed everything himself.
Finn Juhl is not as well know in the broad public as the grand old men of Danish Design PH, Arne Jacobsen or Hans Wegner. But his style and forms are just as interesting and his home is a master piece of balancing colours, shapes and light. His furniture, especially his chairs, are really well know outside of Denmark as well.
To walk around in his home gave you a complete new way of experiencing his design and choices of decoration. In connection with the opening of his house Ordrupgaard has an exhibition showing in detail how he managed to combine his own furniture with colours and his choices of art. Here you can see a small online slideshow of his house.

The House in my Head

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing a few of Randi & Kartine’s art-installations. These two young Danish artists make the most wonderful houses that trigger your imagination with their surprising movements. They are model houses but with a lot of soul and life inside.
The exposition is shown at Gl. Strand and even though it is very small, it still proves that Randi & Katrine can bring weird and strange ideas to life. Shaped like human heads with the windows as eyes and doors as mouths the houses each have different moving features which adds life and mystery.

There is a playful and theatrical feeling in the exhibition that I don’t think I’ve experienced since I as a child saw pieces by Jean Tinguely – but Randi & Katrine are simpler in their work and leave more to your imagination and this really intrigues me. I hope it will one day be possible to see larger exhibitions with their work.

A trip down designer memory lane

Here is a small post about my visit last week to the Danish Museum of Decoration and Design here in Copenhagen. I decided to pay a visit to the museum because I haven’t been there for ages. It is a bit of an old fashion museum in the sense that after Danish Design Centre opened a few years back The Danish Museum of Decoration and Design has become more of a historical museum looking back in time. What’s on display here is the history of Danish design and general design and it only pays little attention to the ongoing developments. The standing exhibition is therefore a very large part of the museum and there are only few and rather small special exhibitions. This is the reason I guess why I haven’t set foot in the museum for quite a few years; seeing it all again now was a lot of fun, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back to see the permanent exhibition any time soon.

However it brought back a lot of childhood memories of the homes of my grand parents; many of the designer classics on display there were and are still parts of Danish homes today. Hans Wegner chairs and Verner Panton lamps are still very popular today and a lot of Børge Mogensen’s furniture designs were not that expensive in the 50s and 60s. The legendary lamps created by Poul Henningsen and the B&O radios were part of both my grandparents’ and my childhood home. Seeing this standing exhibition was therefore fun and sort of historically educative, but it did not show me anything about what’s happing with Danish design these days and I missed that a bit.

Copenhagen in illustration

I have always been very fascinated by Danish old school poster design. The visiting exhibition shows posters and illustrations by Danish illustrator Ib Andersen . Although I at first thought I didn’t know him, he has created many of the well known posters for example for Tivoli:

With the same brilliant perspective on street life and everyday scenery as Touslouse-Lautrec Ib Andersen also made illustrations for newspapers such as Politiken and Berlingske Tidende in the 1930s and onwards. These examples show how he both captures the city's loneliness and isolation, and can turn shapes and shadows into artistic master pieces.

But Ib Andersen's illustrations are also legendary in other less acknowledged ways – he is the guy behind the illustrations on the old Danish 20,50,100 and 1000 kroner bills. I know it seems silly to get all sentimental about illustrations on money, but for some reason I really think that they deserve greater artistic attention. These days when we're all using our credit cards more and more and a lot of cash becomes rare I think it would be cool if we could take time and look at the bills - they are small pieces of artwork.