Torben Ebbesen, Between Yes and No, Simian, Copenhagen
The Ørestad district’s semi-new art venue Simian keeps presenting some of Copenhagen’s best exhibitions, and August saw the opening of a museum-level solo show featuring Danish artist Torben Ebbesen. Vast, but neither crowded nor impenetrable, this presentation of five decades of work made it seem as if Ebbesen’s art could accommodate anything, both in terms of media and materials. Losing myself in his meticulous accumulations of gizmos and humour and impeccable beauty was like trying to see through questions, perhaps even before they were asked at all. The works felt like the essence of art: everything pre-physical originating from some formless place inside the head had, with alternately sophisticated and casual attention, been assigned a place within the tangible reality that others can participate in and be moved by.
The Banana School, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen
In the summer and autumn of 2022, the basement of Den Frie, which is essentially a single room, was taken over by Bananskolen (The Banana School), which presented an exhibition that was densely packed in every sense of the term. There must have been approximately one hundred pictures hung on four walls, a couple of sculptures, and two display cases holding records and school timetables and various valuables, all formed a framework around the project’s real content: four months of school consisting of performances, lectures, reading groups, music lessons, concerts, art theory, poetry school, etc. Utterly saturated in imagery, the space itself felt like a splendid rarity (paintings generally demand/get plenty of space around them in order to be granted sufficient seriousness as art), and having a non-free art venue treated to such an extensive free event programme felt like a scoop of a kind that will probably be rare at Copenhagen art institutions in the future.
Ejnar Nielsen, Signs of Life, The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen
There is something dark in Ejnar Nielsen’s paintings, something that lingers in our eyes or our bodies after leaving this gorgeous (almost too gorgeous) presentation of his main works. We don’t need to know much about Nielsen’s pictures to sense that death and misery abound in them, but the truly overwhelming parts of the exhibition were the interludes of bright life amidst the suffering. The fact that, in the iconic tubercular gazes, in all the dull, stony, grey lives and the chill landscapes, we always find traces that promise a return – an inescapable and uplifting awareness of cycles, even in depictions of lives ending. Flowers and grains juxtaposed with dismay and disease. The paintings are so magnetically beautiful, as if both sadness and warmth were embedded in the paint itself, that moving through the gloom proved a rare moment of catharsis for an autumn-blue mood.
Nanna Friis is an art historian and one of Kunstkritikk’s writers. She is also an art critic at Politiken, employed at Overgaden, and part of the exhibition venue AYE-AYE.
For this year’s contributions to Kunstkritikk’s Advent Calendar, see here.
