Exhibitions in Copenhagen and surroundings - Spring 2023

In this exhibition, the South Korean artist, Kimsooja, will capture the underground space of Cisternerne. You are invited into an ethereal space where light, projected into iridescent colour spectra, transforms the former water reservoir into a sacred sea of light.

With her complete installation in Cisternerne, Kimsooja exploits the unique underground climate and architectural space of Cisternerne, where time stands still, and phone signal isn’t sufficient. Here she invites the audience into an illusory space where light splits in all the colours of the rainbow and transforms the former water reservoir into a sacred sea of light. Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. An exhibition which can’t be explored anywhere else than in the historical Cisternerne.

Copenhagen fashion week 2023, that rolled out in February was declared the first fur-free fashion week. At the same time, the breeding of mink has been allowed again in Denmark.

So will the fur fashion of the future be characterized by 'fake fur' or animal fur? And will the highly specialized fur craft survive?

The exhibition FUR puts a spotlight on fur as a controversial article of clothing and opens up a debate about the future of fur in the light of the dilemmas about climate, health and animal welfare that are linked to it.

In 2023, the Danish Architecture Center’s first permanent exhibition on Danish architecture will open. The exhibition unfolds the history of Danish architecture from the Viking Age to present day.

With the exhibition, you will experience the role architecture has played in our formation, our understanding of culture and our common future. In addition to all the highlights of Danish architectural history, there will also be an opportunity to dive into the individual style periods, meet the architects, and discover completely new projects with great impact on the architecture we are surrounded by today and in the future.

The exhibition contains architecture at all levels of scale, from buildings and urban spaces to infrastructure and landscape architecture, and it will accommodate a multitude of different ways of experiencing the architecture. Iconic buildings are resurrected i.a. to life in small, enveloping, cinematic experiences that give you a fantastic and present experience of Danish architecture – it’s almost like standing in the physical building.

The Glyptotek was built by the brewery owner Carl Jacobsen in 1897, after he and his wife Ottilia Jacobsen had donated their art collection to the public. He named his museum ‘Glyptotek’ (meaning ‘a collection of sculptures’) after the Greek words glyptos (‘carving’ or ‘sculpting’) and theke (‘receptacle’).

The exhibition will provide you with a glimpse of what is concealed behind the richly decorated façades, outlining the methods of the architects and what it was like to work for the brewing magnate Carl Jacobsen, who had strong opinions about what the buildings should finally look like.

The original vision for the museum was not to build a traditional one, but to construct a “temple of beauty”, in which art could speak to everyone, and in which the architecture would provide a magnificent setting.

Today, the Glyptotek comprises three different buildings, built by architects Vilhelm Dahlerup, Hack Kampmann and Henning Larsen architecture firm.

This exhibition shows off the works by Jesper Christiansen, whose oeuvres have grown in significance and recognition over the past forty years. It takes the audience on a journey from the minimalistic beginnings to the epic paintings of interiors and landscapes of recent years. His motifs are illusionistic and distinctly decorative, and the colours appear luminous on the black primer. Christiansen paints figuratively but not realistically.

 Christiansen’s landscape pictures are inspired by Vergil, Dante, Goethe, and Poussin, and the whole series of paintings is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s summer cottage or Kierkegaard’s flat. Christiansen often mixes realities by filling his, often large-scale, canvases with references to world art but also to his own environment, travel, and accessories from his studio and home in Odsherred, Denmark.

With over one hundred works, the exhibition throws a kaleidoscopic light on Jesper Christiansen’s oeuvre from its minimalistic beginnings in 1978 and the word paintings until now.

Visit the house of Finn Juhl

The furniture designer and architect Finn Juhl designed and decorated his house at 15 Kratvænget in Ordrup at the age of thirty. Finn Juhl’s house, completed in 1942, is now considered one of Denmark’s most successful functionalist single-family houses. Very few houses by Finn Juhl exist today: while he was a trained architect, he mainly achieved fame as a furniture designer. 
Finn Juhl’s sculptural furniture designs are represented throughout the house. Here you will find the Chieftain Chair, Poet Sofa, Silver Table, and many others. But the furniture does not stand alone. Art occupies an equally prominent place: works by leading Danish artists of the time, such as Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Asger Jorn, Erik Thommesen and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, were carefully selected by Finn Juhl. In keeping with Finn Juhl’s vision, the house constitutes a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk where architecture, design and art harmonise.

In the new exhibition at Ordrupgaard, the new works by young contemporary artist Klara Lilja (b. 1989) is invited to the museum for an updated meeting with Jean René Gauguin (1881 – 1961), who is represented with several works in the permanent collection. The exhibition takes off in Gauguin’s masterpiece “Seaman and mermaid” from 1928, which is set in Zaha Hadid’s building. Gauguin’s painting is placed freely in the room, so it can be seen from all sides and interact with Liljas works that depict existential transformations in a “quirky” universe of beauty and horror.

On the occasion of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s international documentary film festival, Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Art Gallery Charlottenborg) presents the first solo exhibition in Scandinavia with the award-winning British artist Jeremy Deller. The exhibition highlights documentary aspects of Deller’s practice through film, photography, graphics and sculptural installations. Here, several memorable moments from our time have been captured in various works created over the past fifteen years.

The exhibition opens with the extensive installation “Warning Graphic Content”, which consists of over a hundred paper works, graphics, prints and posters from 1993–2021. Throughout his career, Deller has challenged the notion of the unique and exalted work of art. In line with this approach, the exhibition opens with a retrospective presentation that sets the tone for the following rooms in terms of both theme and expression.

This spring, Louisiana will host the first-ever presentation of the work of Niko Pirosmani (1862-1918) in Northern Europe, Georgia’s most famous artist and a mythical figure in the story of early modernist art. The exhibition will showcase around fifty rarely-seen Pirosmani masterpieces on loan from the Georgian National Museum.

The exhibition will show the almost mythical, simple, gleaming depictions of people and wildlife by this self-taught sign painter and penniless vagabond place Pirosmani as an outstanding exponent of early modern art.

The exhibition at DAC will focus on the Copenhagenish architecture, the design of its urban spaces and its importance. Copenhagen in Common intends to raise questions such as – how does architecture frame the way we interact? How can it strengthen our sense of community? And when does it do the opposite? Who decides what architecture should look like? And how do we show consideration for those with the greatest needs and the most vulnerable in the city as it grows and takes up more and more space?

It’s about Copenhagen and it’s about communities: those the citizens are part of, those they form in the city, and those some feel have gone lost. Big and small. From squares and urban spaces, which foster the close-knit community of a village in the big city, to student housing created from old shipping containers with spacious common areas.

In early summer, ARKEN presents a solo show featuring Eva Steen Christensen (b. 1969), one of Denmark’s pre-eminent contemporary sculptors. The exhibition showcases the artist’s key works and incorporates two new sculptures created especially for ARKEN.

When creating her sculptures, Eva Steen Christensen takes her starting point in everyday objects, elements from architecture and subjects from art history. In her works, familiar forms, materials and ideas are turned upside down, processed and put together anew. The sculptures challenge our perception of reality, offering alternatives to the established narratives and imagery of the Western world.

Eva Steen Christensen investigates the qualities of different materials and the stories they contain. She is keenly interested in physical materials such as textiles, paper, bronze and concrete, and she investigates how the materials used in art have manifested in the images and traditions that shape us as people. For example, how has art’s cultivation of the naked female body, ‘the female nude’, impacted our view of women and gender? Steen Christensen wants to take ownership of such issues, displacing traditional masculine values to imbue the feminine with genuine power.

In 2021, CC won the Bikuben Foundation Vision Exhibition Award for the project Yet, It Moves!. The exhibition links scientific research and art through the theme of movement as a phenomenon from micro- to macrocosm.

A collaborative venture of international and Danish artists and important scientific partners will realise the project. The results will appear via art installations in public spaces in Copenhagen and three of CC’s exhibition halls during the summer and autumn of 2023.

Yet, It Moves! is both an exhibition and a research project examining movement – above, around, and within us.

Through a broad artistic programme, Yes, It Moves! examines movement as a ubiquitous phenomenon, illuminating the many complex patterns of movement that impact us all. Movement is a basic premise for all life forms in the universe regardless of whether they are galaxies or planets moving around the sun, particles in the atmosphere, or life forms on Planet Earth; everything in the universe is in motion, and every part is interconnected. We tend to forget how our everyday movements form part of more significant contexts while our bodily movements through space and time leave footprints, thus contributing to shaping the world around us.

In the special exhibition “Haenyeo – Women of the Sea”, we dive into the story of the female free divers on Jeju island off South Korea’s coast.

Haenyeo are the women of the sea, female freedivers who dive for animals and plants and live in symbiosis with the sea, waves and storms.

The Haenyeo tradition dates more than a thousand years back and is based on unity, discipline, sustainable fishing and spiritual worship of the goddess of the sea. The exhibition portrays the Haenyeo tradition through films, objects and photos. It shows women providing for the family and the men looking after the children and the homes, a culture that is so unusual that it has been included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

In the exhibition, the audience comes face to face with 26 large portrait photos of female divers on their way up from the sea after a hard and dangerous day’s work underwater. Worn and tired, but with a clear look in their eyes. Most of them are between 60 – 80 years old but strong. They have built up much knowledge about the sea and marine life through generations. The profession is passed down, and the girls are trained for the harsh diving life at an early age.

The exhibition is a solo presentation by the Swedish avant-garde artist, which partly demonstrates Grünewald’s influence on the colourful expressionist qualities of his master Matisse. It also shows how Grünewald finds his way into Scandinavian modernism, which has not yet been seen in his time. Grünewald was lonely, and his work points towards a new Nordic direction of decorative expressionism, which deserves to stand in its own right.

The exhibition “In The Realm of Fantasy” focuses on Grünewald’s decisive period in the 1910s and 20s, when he made an international impact. In these years, Grünewald worked experimentally, freely and playfully, investigating the interplay between solid and bright colours – often complementary.

Naturalism’s rules about true-to-life colours, spaces and perspectives are abolished in favour of an expressionistic decorative and fauvistic play of colour, where a belief in originality in the artistic expression and colour as its expressive power is paramount. The exhibition shows a large selection of the artist’s paintings with common themes such as the big city, nature and landscapes, floral motifs and self- and friend portraits.