Arken Art and the Glyptotek

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Sunday was train trip south of Copenhagen to Ishøj where a very new contemporary art gallery, Arken, has just been built. Its distinctive architecture stands out on the windswept coastal grasses and dunes.

A whole room devoted to Damien Hirst, the British artist famous for his diamond encrusted skull and preserved shark and calf. Here the skull was a photo but the two halves of the calf were real. Both front halves, preserved in formaldehyde, in separate structures where you could walk between and have an intimate view of the insides of a calf. Two calves actually. A bit disturbing really.

A room of 45 clowns confronted us next. Also quite extraordinary. Titled ‘vocabulary of solitude’ the clowns are seen before or after a show in a contemplative mood. All the faces are different.

A video work challenged viewers to confirm or deny a physiological study which found that people are more sympathetic to movie stars telling harrowing stories of fictional refugees than they are to actual refugees telling their own story. Two stars were telling fictional stories and in another room 6 refugees told their own stories.

On the way there we met a couple of Belgian women who told us about an exhibition of French art on at the Glyptotek Museum, opposite the Tivoli Gardens. This museum is full of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman art so we weren’t quite sure how this exhibition came to be there. It is a new part of the building and arranged in reverse time order so the viewer can clearly see the development of art from 1809 to 1968 with most emphasis on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All the significant artists were represented including a copy of Degas’ Little Dancer.

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