Henrik Olesen, Food chain incl. prehistoric animals, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. Curated by Marianne Torp
“Do we really need quite so many novel-ish novels?” critic and author Susanne Christensen wrote recently, nailing the spirit of the 2020s with pinprick precision. And, I might add, we don’t need any more performance-ish performances either, or exhibition-ish exhibitions. Which brings me to what struck me most about Henrik Olesen’s retrospective: for all its carefully controlled neatness, it had enough cracks (leaving enough oxygen to the brain) to slide like a languid crocodile down the bank into murky water and out of reach of the obsequious and frictionless ‘content’ formatting you increasingly encounter everywhere in contemporary art. The papier-mâché crocodiles twisted and turned, landing perfectly on a boggy Nile edge, poised somewhere between after-school club crafting and evolutionary history.
Lutz Bacher, Burning the Days, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo. Curated by Solveig Øvstebø, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert
Happily, the exhibition spanning fifty years of Lutz Bacher’s work hadn’t been fed through any funky formatting mill either. It was ‘just’ the raw, unalloyed works presented plainly, then oddly, then plainly again. Balanced, but not too deferential. A pair of stuffed jeans, or a big polystyrene sphere with splotches of water damage; perhaps the innards of something that once moonlit as stage scenery. “Readymades with patina,” the curators called them at the excellent exhibition seminar. Not readymades intended to demonstrate that anything can be art (Duchamp), or that everything is commodities and transactions (the art of the 90s and 00s), but in order to inject a destabilising affect into things. Shameless, filthy, or sentimental. The floor tilts beneath the viewer while Bacher steers well clear of any kind of plot – unless, of course, it leads to one big, fat joke.
Viera Collaro, White on Color and Light, Bianca D’Alessandro, Copenhagen
Bianca D’Alessandro puts on the finest gallery exhibitions in the country, basta! The late-summer show featuring Viera Collaro was no exception. The space was quiet and white, lit only by daylight from the skylights. The white paintings appeared like soft, chalked panes infused with a smouldering pulse of colour that flickered through the uppermost glazed layers. A warm orange light slipped onto the floor from beneath a large, radiant star formation that had landed in the middle of the space. More chapel than sci-fi, and more humanism than Minimalism. Ahhhh! [deep sigh of relief].
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
– Translated from Danish
