print January 2007

Knut Henrik Henriksen

Knut Henrik Henriksen’s show took as its inspiration a meeting between Le Corbusier and Albert Einstein that transpired in 1942. The architect availed himself of the opportunity to explain his work on the Modulor system, an attempt to locate the golden section proportional to the height of the average person. The human body could thus become the pivotal point of built space, promising an ideal basis for commodious, harmonic, universally standardized edifices. Einstein responded that if realized, the Modulor would make “the bad difficult and the good easy.”

In his sculptures and installations,

print November 2006

“fantom”

According to Søren Andreasen and Jesper Rasmussen, the two artists who curated “fantom,” their group show scans the ambivalent and intoxicating terrain where fact meets fiction: “A phantom . . . is a product of the imagination that is experienced as real—and, conversely, a reality that is experienced as fantastic. In other words, a phantom abolishes the difference between imagination and reality and presents itself in their stead.” The exhibition “takes its point of departure in the circumstance that our culture is chiefly concerned with its own production. It is a culture that has itself as

previews September 2006

Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Counting some 180 canvases and works on paper from a forty-year span, this retrospective marks the most substantial showing of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s oeuvre outside of the Nordic region since his death in 1931 and promises to introduce one of Finland’s most important artists to a new audience.

Counting some 180 canvases and works on paper from a forty-year span, this retrospective marks the most substantial showing of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s oeuvre outside of the Nordic region since his death in 1931 and promises to introduce one of Finland’s most important artists to a new audience. Gallen-Kallela’s paintings helped define the emerging national identity of nineteenth-century postcolonial Finland. Like other national-romantic artists, he reflected collective belonging through depictions of the local landscape but

print February 2006

“Summer of Love”

With “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” curator Christoph Grunenberg (director of Tate Liverpool, which organized this show) sets out to rescue ’60s psychedelic art from art-historical neglect. Visually striking, hard to institutionalize, and burdened by the failure of the era’s ambition to merge pleasure and politics, psychedelia is indeed fascinating—and full of paradox. Psychedelic art (and culture) respected no media boundaries, spanning architecture, design, film, fashion, music, and more. It challenged hierarchical distributions of authorship, was policed by no academy, and may

print November 2005

Maryam Jafri

In Costume Party, 2005, history becomes a chamber play. Written and directed by Maryam Jafri for her first solo museum presentation, the three-screen video installation features nonactors along with film and theater professionals. Other recent works hybridizing video art with film or the live arts come to mind—for different reasons, Yinka Shonibare’s Un Ballo in Maschera, 2004, and Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij’s Mandarin Ducks, 2005—but Costume Party is an altogether more satirical project.

The party guests have been invited to come dressed from their favorite historical period, and so

previews May 2005

Per Kirkeby

That Per Kirkeby works with a diverse range of media—painting, graphics, sculpture, installation, and film—is well known. But his Danish audience also recognizes him as an essayist with a substantial monographic backlist that illustrates his varied tastes. This exhibition reveals Kirkeby’s relationship to the art-historical greats about whom he has written (like Giacometti, Gauguin, and Rodin) by displaying their works in dialogue with his own. While this sounds like a potential pantheon, Steffensen, an artist and professor at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy, suggests that

interviews January 2005

1000 WORDS: YINKA SHONIBARE

King Gustav III of Sweden (1746–1792), who waged and won a war against Russia, was a keen amateur actor and a figure of ambiguous sexuality. That a masked ball at the Royal Opera served as the scene for his death by an assassin’s hand gave his demise an appropriately symbolic twist. Yinka Shonibare’s first film, Un Ballo in Maschera, 2004, a coproduction by Swedish Television and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, is a choreography based on the king’s assassination, featuring thirty dancers attired in Shonibare’s trademark pseudo-African batik. Filmed at Confidencen, a private theater previously

print Summer 2004

Peter Louis-Jensen

The avant-garde project of total integration of art and society eventually leads out of art. Peter Louis-Jensen (1941–99) was among those who took this route, although he made more stops along the way than most. He pioneered Minimalism and a kind of Pop-brut-structure painting as well as producing graphic work, assemblages, Happenings, films, and sound works. Around 1970 this full creative palette exploded in political activism. If to some extent Louis-Jensen disappeared from the establishment radar due to his peregrinations in and outside of art, with his radicalism and impatience he always

print December 2003

Claus Carstensen/Peter Zimmermann

Once a year, the Esbjerg Art Museum asks a Danish artist to be his or her own matchmaker and invite an exhibition partner from abroad. This summer, painter Claus Carstensen doubled up with Cologne-based colleague Peter Zimmermann under the title “X-pollination (hænging og høring)” (Hanging and Hearing). On first sight, the pairing of Carstensen’s coded surfaces and Zimmermann’s mute, shimmering ones look more like a showdown than a pas de deux—the Copenhagen tough guy versus the Cologne hipster. But they share one major concern that goes to the bone of their style, namely, the emphasis on

previews September 2003

PROCESS: Encounters in Live Situations / Shifting Spaces

Stretching out in time and across media, including performance and workshops, “PROCESS” explores subthemes as heterogeneous as emotion, self-organization, “senses/spaces,” portraiture, and landscape.

Group show or art festival? “PROCESS” forgoes the usual survey approach by having not one but seven openings for this show of some twenty-five artists. Stretching out in time and across media, including performance and workshops, “PROCESS” explores subthemes as heterogeneous as emotion, self-organization, “senses/spaces,” portraiture, and landscape; the goal, according to Kiasma curators Maaretta Jaukkuri, Patrik Nyberg, Jari-Pekka Vanhala, and Virve Sutinen, is to underline the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art. Contributions include work by corporate-cum-activist group Superflex,

print September 2003

Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise

There’s a new college in town. Copenhagen Free University, which emerged from the art world over the last few years, doesn’t matriculate students but instead engages a range of critical communities. Initiated by artists Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise, it is housed in a single room in their home. But its physical size belies the wealth of functions offered, which include a gallery (CFU is now showing the founders’ own ABZ, 2002/2003), a residency (a bunk bed strapped to the wall), and a bookshop (Barnes & Noble needn’t be afraid, but cognoscenti will find here what can’t be found elsewhere).

print Summer 2003

Martin Boyce

Under the majestically scaled projection of the phrase THIS PLACE IS DREAMING, a choreography of sculptural elements evoked an urban romanticism that took the beholder toward horizons of futurist reverie. Or: Under the looming projection of the phrase THIS PLACE IS DREAMING, the chain-link fencing and steel elements recalled the stage designs of the theater of the absurd and their tortured signs of mid-twentieth-century European spirituality. Each of these descriptions of Martin Boyce’s installation Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, 2002, is in accordance with the

Lars Bang Larsen