I also managed to stop by this year’s Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg yesterday.
As always, a dense and somewhat uneven experience — but also precisely because of that, a place where you can calibrate your own sense of what resonates.
I found myself returning to two works in particular.
Peter Rolsted’s Festens midtpunkt — a crowded, almost theatrical table scene where a single figure remains absorbed in her own quiet activity, seemingly indifferent to the surrounding celebration.
And Sigurd Lucca Weck’s Maskebal — more withdrawn, almost introspective, with its slightly unsettling masked figure caught somewhere between presence and distance.
What struck me, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a pattern I recognise in myself.
Again and again, I am drawn to works that operate within relatively given frames — painting, figuration, composition — rather than the many installations that dominate contemporary exhibitions.
Not because the latter are without merit.
But because their lasting value often seems more tightly coupled to the present moment — to a specific discourse, a political framing, or the logic of the exhibition itself.
Whereas the former, at least in the best cases, appear to hold something slightly more resistant to time.
Perhaps that is just a conservative instinct.
Or perhaps it is simply a question of where one expects durability to reside.
05/03/2026 18:44:41
nb
See More (10 posts)
- I also managed to stop by this year’s Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg yesterday.
As always, a dense and somewhat uneven experience — but also precisely because of that, a place where you can calibrate your own sense of what resonates.
I found myself returning to two works in particular.
Peter Rolsted’s Festens midtpunkt — a crowded, almost theatrical table scene where a single figure remains absorbed in her own quiet activity, seemingly indifferent to the surrounding celebration.
And Sigurd Lucca Weck’s Maskebal — more withdrawn, almost introspective, with its slightly unsettling masked figure caught somewhere between presence and distance.
What struck me, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a pattern I recognise in myself.
Again and again, I am drawn to works that operate within relatively given frames — painting, figuration, composition — rather than the many installations that dominate contemporary exhibitions.
Not because the latter are without merit.
But because their lasting value often seems more tightly coupled to the present moment — to a specific discourse, a political framing, or the logic of the exhibition itself.
Whereas the former, at least in the best cases, appear to hold something slightly more resistant to time.
Perhaps that is just a conservative instinct.
Or perhaps it is simply a question of where one expects durability to reside. (05/03/2026 18:44:41)
- There is a certain moment each year when the courtyard changes character almost overnight.
The Japanese cherry tree — now more than ten years old, and originally a birthday gift — suddenly moves from being part of the background to becoming the centre of attention.
Jeanne and I have, almost without deciding it, turned this into a small tradition. Marking the few days where it stands in full bloom.
It is beautiful every year. And yet never quite the same.
Perhaps that is part of the appeal — the predictability of the event, combined with the unpredictability of how it actually unfolds. Light, temperature, timing. All the small variables that resist planning.
There is also something slightly paradoxical about it.
A tree planted as something permanent, yet most striking precisely in its most transient state.
It does, admittedly, need pruning again soon.
Which is perhaps another way of saying that even traditions require a bit of maintenance. (05/03/2026 18:30:38)
- I just managed to stop by Gl. Strand yesterday to see Daddy Issues before it closed today.
I’m not entirely sure I bought into the premise.
Perhaps it is just me struggling a bit to follow the spirit of the time — or perhaps some exhibition frameworks try a little too hard to impose coherence on works that would be stronger left to resonate on their own terms.
That said, there is something genuinely rewarding about seeing so many young Danish — and international — artists gathered in one place. Especially when they are artists whose development you have been able to follow from their early beginnings.
It creates a different kind of viewing experience. Less about discovery, more about continuity.
I particularly enjoyed the three works by Magnus Andersen.
There is something both playful and unsettling in his universe — ceramic ducks, a pike, domestic objects slightly out of place — that resists easy interpretation. Which is precisely why I find it somewhat forced to tie them too tightly to a theme like Daddy Issues.
But perhaps that is also the point of contemporary exhibitions today: the tension between the work itself and the narrative constructed around it.
And maybe the more interesting question is not whether the theme fits —
—but how much we are willing to let it guide what we see. (05/03/2026 18:26:31)
- There is something quietly fitting about spending 1 May — Workers’ Day — in a concert hall.
Not in abstraction, but in the company of people whose work quite literally unfolds in front of you, in real time.
Jeanne and I spent the evening at DR Koncerthuset with Anne and Michael, listening to Beethoven performed by the DR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Antonello Manacorda, with Leif Ove Andsnes at the piano.
The programme moved through Beethoven’s musical landscape, but the centre of gravity was unmistakable: the Piano Concerto No. 3.
A work that feels almost architectural in its construction, yet intensely human in its expression. Andsnes played it with a kind of clarity and restraint that made the piece unfold rather than announce itself — controlled, precise, and quietly powerful.
It is easy to forget, sitting in a concert hall, how much work lies behind such an evening. Not just practice, but coordination, listening, adjustment — a collective discipline that is both visible and invisible at the same time.
Perhaps that is what made it feel like an appropriate way to mark the day.
A room full of people listening.
And a group of musicians working — at a level where work becomes something else entirely.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of capturing the moment on a smartphone.
But perhaps that tension remains: between documenting and experiencing.
And the question, still, of whether we know when to do which. (05/03/2026 18:12:28)
- A small detour from the Renaissance.
In Florence, that almost feels like a minor act of disobedience.
After hours among Donatello, Verrocchio, della Robbia — all those carefully observed, increasingly individualised human figures — I walked over to Museo Novecento to see Avanti, an exhibition of prints by Georg Baselitz.
Woodcuts, linocuts, etchings. Black on yellow. Black on black. Rough, insistent lines.
Titles like Fahrradfahrer (Cyclist, 1982), Schwarze Mutter, schwarzes Kind (Black mother, black child, 1985), Meine neue Mütze (My new hat, 2002), and Die große Nacht im Eimer (Remix) (2006).
Baselitz belongs to that unavoidable post-war German generation — alongside Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Of the three, I find myself more drawn to Kiefer and Richter.
And Baselitz’ answer, famously, is to turn the world upside down.
Quite literally.
Figures inverted by 180 degrees. Motifs denied their immediate readability. A refusal to let us simply “recognise” before we actually see.
I am not entirely sure I am a fan.
But I keep returning to the gesture.
Because it is both simple and oddly radical: if you turn the image, you interrupt the habit.
You force perception to start over.
So, in a small act of quiet heresy — and with the help of an iPhone — I turned the works back again.
Re-reversed them.
And the question lingers:
When does an image become visible?
When the artist disrupts it — or when we restore it? (04/21/2026 14:02:09)
- And then there is this boy.
A glazed terracotta bust by Luca della Robbia, Busto di fanciullo, from somewhere around 1460–1470.
I must have returned to this work five or six times over the past 15–30 years.
At first, it was almost accidental. Later, it became intentional.
Because something happens here that is different from the heroic bronzes and the carefully composed Renaissance ideals.
This is not a type. Not an allegory. Not even quite an ideal.
It is a child.
When my own sons were the same age, I remember standing them beneath the sculpture and being struck — almost uncomfortably — by the resemblance. Not because they looked the same in any precise way, but because the expression felt familiar.
The slightly uncertain gaze.
The softness that has not yet become self-consciousness.
It is easy to speak about the Renaissance as the rediscovery of the individual.
But here, the thought becomes simpler.
Children are the same across centuries.
And perhaps that is why this work stays.
Because it is not about Florence in the 15th century.
It is about something that has not changed. (04/21/2026 13:43:01)
- What fascinates me most about the sculptures at the Bargello — and especially these examples by Verrocchio, Donatello, and della Robbia — is not just their beauty, but their specificity.
They are idealised, yes. But they are not generic.
Each face carries something recognisable, almost contemporary: a tilt of the head, a suggestion of character, a quiet self-awareness. These are not abstractions of “man” — they are individuals.
Standing in the large hall on the first floor, it becomes clear that something quite radical is happening here.
Because this is not only about technique, or even about rediscovering antiquity.
It is about a shift in attention.
From the symbolic to the particular.
From the type to the person.
The Renaissance is often described as placing “man at the centre”. But that can sound like a slogan.
In these sculptures, it feels more precise.
Not man in general.
But this man.
This face.
This expression.
And perhaps that is the deeper break: the recognition that individuality itself is worthy of representation. (04/21/2026 13:28:52)
- Every time I am in Florence, I return to the Bargello.
It is not a large museum. It does not have the crowds of the Uffizi. And yet, it holds something that feels closer to the core of the Renaissance: sculpture as thought made physical.
Michelangelo is there. Donatello is there.
But for me, it is Giambologna.
His bronze Mercury — balanced on a breath, one foot resting on a gust of wind, the body spiralling upward as if gravity were merely a suggestion — is one of those works that seem almost implausible. Not only as art, but as physics.
Perhaps that is why it has been copied so many times. It invites repetition, almost demands it. As if each copy were an attempt to understand how such lightness could be cast in bronze.
This time, I gave in.
I bought a small version. Not the original, of course, but something closer to the miniature variants also present in the museum — a version scaled to the desk rather than the piazza.
There is something slightly paradoxical about bringing Mercury home.
A god of movement, reduced to an object of stillness.
And yet, perhaps that is precisely the point.
Because what we take with us from places like Bargello is not the object itself, but the attempt to hold on to a moment of attention. (04/21/2026 11:27:12)
- One of the most beautiful church façades in Florence is Santo Spirito.
It sits on the Oltrarno side of the river, in what is now a slightly paradoxical mix of Renaissance calm and contemporary hipster life — natural wine bars, small ateliers, people who look as if they have carefully not tried too hard.
And then, in Museo Novecento, I unexpectedly encountered it again.
Not as architecture, but as memory.
Ottone Rosai’s Santo Spirito (bozzetto) from 1954 is almost dissolving. The façade is still recognisable — the calm geometry, the round window, the quiet authority of the structure — but it appears as if seen through time rather than space. As if the building is less an object than an impression left behind.
Standing later in front of the actual church, the comparison becomes unavoidable.
The real façade is precise, almost austere. The painted one is hesitant, softened, already slipping away.
Perhaps that is what painting does best: not documenting what is there, but what remains.
And perhaps cities work the same way.
We return to the same places — Santo Spirito, Teatro della Pergola — and think we are revisiting something stable.
But what we are really encountering is a layered accumulation of versions of ourselves. (04/21/2026 11:07:02)
- More than 30 years ago, when I was studying at the European University Institute in Florence, I used to come often to concerts at Teatro della Pergola. Mostly because tickets were made available to EUI students — but also because the place itself seemed to insist that you stayed a little longer in the world of music than you perhaps intended.
The other day I returned.
This time with Jeanne and Vilhelm, and with a programme that felt almost too carefully composed to be accidental: Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, Mozart’s Sonata K.404, another Pärt piece (Mozart-Adagio), Gija Kancheli’s Middelheim, and, after the break, Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio.
Performed by Gidon Kremer (violin), Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė (cello), and Georgijs Osokins (piano).
It is a strange experience to return to a place where your younger self once sat, convinced that you were “taking it in,” only to realise how much of it you probably didn’t understand.
I know this may be close to sacrilege — and forgive me, I plead my own lack of musicality — but I couldn’t help feeling that Gidon Kremer sounded a little… worn. Not in a dismissive sense, but almost as if the music had passed through him so many times that something had shifted. Less precision, perhaps. Or something else entirely.
And yet, maybe that is the point.
Because the evening was not really about technical perfection. It was about continuity. About sitting in the same theatre, decades apart, listening to the same repertoire, and realising that what changes is not the music, but the listener.
Or perhaps both. (04/21/2026 10:52:15)