Villiam Miklos Andersen, Caffè Crema, O-Overgaden, Copenhagen
The first thing to greet me in the exhibition is a coffee machine, the kind you find at European roadside service stations, pouring watery coffee into small plastic cups. The machine reminds me of greasy hair and a faint smell of sweat after driving at night on the E45, whose rest areas the artist renders with great precision as liminal spaces where people, goods, and sexual exchanges are in transit. The exhibition is a fully cohesive, immersive gesture that brings the artist’s own experiences of life on the road into play and, in the same move, manages to awaken that dormant side of me that yells “fuck” at suffocating normality and is turned-on by the tawdry aesthetics of what has been pushed to the margins.
Miriam Kongstad, Bitch, The Frederiksberg Museums, Frederiksberg
“Bitch” is a controversial word. When it comes out of my seven-year-old son’s mouth, it prompts an instant reaction and a clear admonition that you “DO NOT SAY THAT.” But when Miriam Kongstad put it in her mouth, or rather explored the word in a magnificent performance work in which the power structures shaping women’s desire and love were put under scrutiny – well, then it rang out with power and devil-may-care defiance. Bitch took place in an as-yet unused underground car park in Frederiksberg, beneath the new John Winthers Plads, and it was thrilling to hear Kongstad shout her own version of “It’s Britney, bitch!” in this prim, bourgeois town.
Inge Ellegaard, Billeddomino (Picture Dominoes), Esbjerg Art Museum, Esbjerg
The colours cut into my eyes with insistent force right from exhibition’s first room. Vivid yellows, glaring greens, and blazing reds. And Inge Ellegaard’s colours were not alone in being riotously wild. Ellegaard was wild herself. So it gave me particular delight to see such an extensive collection of works by an artist who as yet cannot boast an exhibition history as extensive as that of her male colleagues from the 1980s De unge vilde movement, literally “the young wild ones,” or “young savages.” The exhibition made it clear that Ellegaard did not need monstrous subject matter or ferociously unconventional materials in order to capture wildness in her art. In fact, she succeeded in doing so through a constant coupling of formal and organic painting, and through an unwavering focus on subjects such as flowers and vacuum cleaners. A wild feat – and one to be grateful for.
– Since 2022, Marie Nipper has been director of Arken Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj. She will step down at the turn of the year to become managing director and co-owner of Creator Projects, which works with strategy and development within art and culture.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
