Copenhagen, Denmark
Graham Reid gets his head and heart pumping in Denmark’s capital city, Copenhagen.
Make no mistake, this art stuff can really take it out of you. It can get your step-rate up, the wind in your face and your aorta working overtime. Especially if you’re in Copenhagen and choose to visit two different galleries – one south of the city, the other way north – and start your day with a couple of beers.
Which is what I did.
In my defence, the breakfast beers were included in the ticket for the Carlsberg Museum tour (“The Copenhagen ex-beerience”), and as luck would have it, this former brewery was a convenient starting point before a visit to the nearby Cisternerne – an art space as bleak, damp and disconcerting as its name suggests.
This recently opened subterranean space is in the centre of Søndermarken Park and a bracing 15-minute walk from the Carlsberg. For me, it was another such walk, because just getting to those beers had been a slushy tramp from the “nearby” Eng have Station through an industrial estate.
At least getting to the unglamorously named Cisternerne would be a literal walk in the park, but on this wind-whipped day when dampness blew horizontally in zero degrees, it was a solitary head-down hike between rows of bare and blackened trees that loomed skeletally overhead.
The two women at the entrance to Cisternerne – little more than a doorway and steps to the darkness below – seemed surprised to see me, even though it was opening day for the exhibition by installation artist Eva Koch whose That Dream of Peace videos on the dank walls evoked war, destruction, terrorism and other such topical subjects.
She’d certainly picked an appropriate theme for her work down in this former water reservoir – opened in 1859 – where the concrete roof is slowly decomposing and the arches echo blighted cathedrals and spooky catacombs.
Her little rays of light projected onto the walls and the disembodied voices on the soundtrack – the exhibition runs until November 30 if you’re still curious – made for an uncomfortable experience.
Which is the point, of course.
But after a claustrophobic 45 minutes – just me and a guy sweeping water from the black floor – I was relieved to be back in the deserted park under slate-grey skies. Then, after waiting for a bus to take me into the central station while watching my breath cloud into the air, it was on to the much-vaunted Louisiana, an internationally acclaimed museum of contemporary art about 45 minutes by train north of the city.
On the way – along a route that takes you through elegant 19th-century suburbs, 20th-century modernist blocks and along the windswept coastline with Sweden just beyond the mist – I considered a recent UN report that announced the good citizens of Denmark to be the most content in the world.
All except Ms Koch, I suppose.
At Humlebæk Station – which, despite the length of the frequently picturesque journey up
the coast, is still part of your rail pass – I began another brisk 15-minute walk to Louisiana. Founded in 1958 by businessman and patron Knud W Jensen, who died in 2000, it attracts half a million visitors a year.
In part that’s because of what it contains: the usual big-ticket guys such as Miro, Warhol, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein. But it also has collections of photography, emerging artists from around the world and, of course, numerous Danish artists whose names are unfamiliar but whose work can be striking.
Of as much interest, however, is the building’s design. The entrance may look like a large old two-storey stone home covered in ivy, but the place opens up into an elegant labyrinth of galleries, well-lit underground spaces, long glass-lined corridors that look out onto sculpture gardens and the ocean (the Alexander Calder mobiles on the terrace getting a right workout in the gale coming off the sea) and much more.
If art were measured in metres, Louisiana in North Zealand – just south of Elsinore, where Shakespeare set his Hamlet – would make for a middle-distance event.
International architects are drawn here to consider how Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert, the original designers, created these beautiful, integrated (since expanded) spaces to house sculpture by Alberto Giacometti and large works by Morris Louis, yet still manage to make the open spaces feel intimate.
Louisiana is one of the world’s great galleries, and the many Danes there on this particularly chilly day seemed content indeed.
For equally contented and well-exercised me, there was the brisk walk back to the station, the equally blue-eared hike back to my hotel …
By the time I got to a warm shower, the pedometer on my phone had a pleasingly high count.
Art. It’s good for the brain and – especially if you’re wrapped up for a day where you need to really pace it out – it’s good for the health.
I’m convinced beer for breakfast helps, too.
Architects are drawn here to consider how the designers created these beautiful, integrated spaces.