CISTERNERNE

MUSEET FOR MODERNE GLASKUNST, Copenhagen

One of the stranger museum experiences, Cisternerne is a collection of contemporary stained glass housed in an old water cistern beneath Søndermarken, a park in the stylish Western suburbs of Copenhagen. You’ve got the Zoo on one side, Frederiksborg Slot (now a military academy) on the other, and then two Louvre-style glass pyramids that serve as entrance and exit to the underground cavern. The first chamber is dedicated to a temporary exhibition of work by Jørgen Hausen Sørensen, a local sculptor whose ceramics are the very stuff of nightmares: gnarled, twisted terracotta heads leer at you out of the darkness, while gaudy, screaming corpses appear to topple or melt into a hellish mess. The effect is entirely disorientating as you stumble your way into the exhibition space (beware, the floor is very wet and slippy – dress as you would for a hike through bogland). The second chamber is where the permanent collection of stained glass is housed, and is slightly warmer and almost friendly by comparison, spotlights straining to highlight the colours. To be truthful, the glass art is not particularly noteworthy: it is one of those contemporary museums where the real exhibit is the environment itself (think of the Bilbao Guggenheim, for example). But the third chamber is enjoyable enough, where a large collection of 17^th century sandstone figures is assembled. These seem like a collection of merry folk who have been seized from some airy overground village and imprisoned here in the dank and dinge. You almost feel sorry for them.

TIP: Don’t try getting here on the Metro, it’s miles away.

DESIGNMUSEUM, Copenhagen

Last year, the Danish Museum of Art and Design underwent a bit of a facelift, changing its name to DesignMuseum in an attempt to move fully into the 21^st century. It was a good idea, because although the setting is historical (an 18^th century hospital), there are one or two nice sideboards, bits of faïence and some surprising ceramics made by Paul Gauguin during his brief stay in Copenhagen, it’s the modern design that people come here for, and the late 20^th century galleries and the temporary exhibitions are the highlights. The inaugural exhibition to promote the rebranding of the museum is still on display for a few more months – a Jasper Morrison-curated sprinkling of 20^th century Danish pieces displayed in front of a Hallingdal textile backdrop. The Kay Bojensen wood figures (particularly the policeman and seagulls) steal this particular show, which aims to showcase the functional side of Danish design. More interesting still is the current exhibition by London-based Danish clothes designer Peter Jensen. Themed around the many ‘muses’ that inspire his outfits, the gallery is crammed full of pouting mannequins representing historical, fictional or contemporary female figures. One dress is a gloriously coloured cityscape; a jacket is composed of dolly mixture-like beads strung together; another muse gazes wistfully out of the window. The effect is mildly unnerving. The permanent collection is impressive, particularly the modern galleries, some of which are themed (the 1980-2000 period is based on recycling, and includes chairs made out of cardboard and even old newsprint), while others are devoted to individual designers such as Arne Jacobsen, of the famous ‘egg’ chair, and Poul Henningsen. The layout of the galleries encourages visitors to travel backwards in time, which has the unfortunate effect of making the later, older galleries seem much less interesting. But you end up at a very pleasant cafe overlooking the central courtyard garden.

Ordrupgaard

Tour de France: French Landscape Painting

Tucked away in a remote suburb of northern Copenhagen, this functionalist slab of concrete surrounded by woodland is about the last place you’d expect to find a substantial collection of Impressionist paintings. The Musée d’Orsay it ain’t. The museum itself seems mildly surprised to have them, too; despite the local connections (Pissarro was born in the Danish West Indies, Gauguin lived here for a while), there’s nothing remotely French about this museum. Even the names of the paintings are given only in Danish; there is precious little non-Danish text anywhere in the complex, which is fine for a stuffy old collection in a little backwater with barely enough cash to pay a receptionist, but not in a swish contemporary setting with glossy bilingual pamphlets that are given away in the city centre tourist information bureau. Just to confuse matters, the current exhibition is poorly organised, with half in one wing of the museum and the other half sharing space with a separate exhibition of Danish 19^th century painting (of local interest only).  Conceptually, the paintings are intended to show the transition in landscape painting from fictitious landscapes through Corot’s plein air method and the Impressionists he inspired to the post-Impressionists’ return to fictitious landscapes. This would be a boldly ambitious project for a big museum, but Ordrupgaard have cobbled it together from their permanent collection and the final phase, represented solely by a Cezanne nude bathing scene and a Gauguin Tahitian portrait, with landscape firmly in the background, smacks of opportunism. In between, however, there are enough Corots to appreciate the changes in his style over time, and a remarkable canvas from Théodore Rousseau (Sunset in the Forest, 1847) whose swirling blotches of stippled colour are unmistakeably impressionistic, 27 years prior to the coining of the term. For a long time it was thought to be a sketch. And there’s a gorgeous Pissarro too (Snowy landscape, Éragny, evening, 1894) with the warmest peach you’ll ever see.

LIVING: FRONTIERS OF ARCHITECTURE III-IV

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, Humblebaek, Denmark

1 June – 2 October

How do we live today? That is essentially the question this exhibition seeks to answer, by way of photographs, models and installations up and down the galleries of this sprawling museum complex. It’s an ambitious project, and one that comes off a treat (mostly). The display is organised around a number of themes that take in the Roma people, Stalinist Russia and various alternative communities, no doubt drawing inspiration from the hippy people’s republic of Christiania in the centre of Copenhagen. But the overarching theme is that of ‘cell and network’, contrasting systems of communal living with the seemingly deep-rooted desire to create one’s own living space. So on the one hand you have the customised individual designs of DIY projects (Atelier Bow Wow, a company that puts together homes by request, or the reclaimed land of Almere near Amsterdam, where you can design your own home online), on the other mass housing concepts, from Stalinist blocks to the Pruitt Igoe project in St Louis that was demolished 16 years after the last brick was laid. This last example is preserved on film, block after eerie block of high-rise flats awaiting the demolition ball. If one thing comes out of the exhibition it is the seemingly fundamental quest by the individual to carve out his or her own private space even within the most hive-like of cellular systems. One way of doing this is through erecting your own boundary, as Arne Quinze’s garden installation demonstrates, playing with the notion of private space as a random assortment of hastily nailed together planks and a personal house number. But even this degree of privacy is stretched in Hong Kong’s cage communities, where commuters have four square metres of bunk bed to call their own, vividly portrayed in a staged photograph where all the cage-dwellers are naked. But a home, as one section of the exhibition points out, is not the same thing as a house. One pair of photographs contrasts the optimistic signage on the unfinished walls of a housing project in Chile with the grim reality of the inhabited dwellings several months later. Then again, the residents were previously living on the streets.

There’s an awful lot here to take in, but it’s well worth the trouble.