I am still in Copenhagen enjoying an extended work visit. My hosts are quite wonderful and suggested that I might like to see an exhibition just outside the city in a little place on the way to Elsinore, called Holte. The museum is called glHoltegaard and in a beautifully restored country house. It is worth going for the house and its wonderful baroque gardens, but the exhibition, as they say, is right up my street. First the house:
I really liked the cannon firing a trailing plant:
The gardens are quite beautiful, and there was an exhibition of sculpture on called ‘Secret Garden’. the lady in the gift shop was quite anxious for me to see the pink sheep. I can only hope they were sprayed with food colouring type dye, but I did dutifully troop off to find them. They are strangely tame and instantly wandered over to see me (and any food I might have, I suppose)
The piece is called
Self-explanatory, I suppose.
My favourite piece in the ‘Secret Garden’ was definitely this installation of blue and white china:
Probably just because I love blue and white china. As Oscar Wilde said:
”I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”.
There is a great cafe which sells a chocolate mousse cake with walnuts so almost a health food really.
The exhibition I went to see was called ‘Out of Fashion’ and was about artists who make work with textiles and clothes. So my Grate Frends Alf and Sara Louise were right – completely up my alley. There was a large tapestry by Grayson Perry. I have never seen his tapestries up close and they are quite superb. The work is exquisite. I took a lot of pictures, but with no flash and just my phone, the close-ups were rubbish. Here’s a reasonable one of Alan Measles, the teddy bear from childhood who turns up in a lot of Perry’s work:
Blurry, but you get the idea. Here are a couple more details which I loved just for their decorative feel:
They were also showing Yinka Shonibare MBE’s stunning silent ballet of a masked ball. New artists to me included Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen who had this compelling video piece about the art world:
Bad photo but spellbinding video. Which is something coming from someone who finds video art tedious in the extreme.
I really liked these unsettling pieces by Erwin Wurm – probably because I love dolls so much. These are quite small – maybe two feet high:
Wonderfully detailed, like the tiny buttonholes on this suit:
But sinister, and quite a brooding portrayal of male power. There was something about the feet that did it:
Probably my favourite piece of the lot was this one by Kaarina Kaikkonen in which she took her dead mother’s dancing shoes and exploded them. They seemed to turn into winged creatures:
There was a strange rustling as I was typing this outside the hotel door – hope they aren’t trying to get in! Actually, they weren’t particularly scary. I don’t know if was her mother’s obvious love of dancing, or her affection for her mother, but they were elegant and charming. I am interested in this idea that clothing has the imprint of the personality or the emotions of the people who wore them. I don’t sense it, but lots of people do, and it is an interesting thing to work with.
So, it was a brilliant exhibition, small and compact with some great work and some frankly, dross, but well worth the trip. And, as the icing on the cake the public transport to get to it was cheap, smooth, fast and regular.
