Denmark Road Trip

White Rope, Fake Grass and Golden Leaves
In a park next to the Silkeborg Art Museum lies a forgotten mini-golf course. Probably a seasonal activity... off season at least, it's more of a sneaky art-installation-in-the-woods... nicer than some of the comissioned art- installations-in-the-woods that I have seen.



Chair Spider
I just couldn't help imagining this cluster of chairs as a stop-action film animation. Scurrying off into a corner of the hedge like a frightened spider.




Skovvilla's Three Columns
One of my favorite gallery spaces out of all ten art museums I visited was in this modest old "forest villa" by Danish architect Anton Rosen. This one wasn't on my list--I didn't even know about it--but just happened upon it when visiting another museum in the same park. The exterior remains original as you can see in the left hand photo. The interior has been converted into display spaces, but with remnants of the orginal floor layout. On one level there are three beautiful columns left in the center of a room--on another level the same structure appears as bearing walls and forms a strange little extra space (pictured on right). The contrast between the outside of the building and the interior conversion is a fantastic surrealist painting.




Green Rooms and Heart
There is a complex of buildings in Herning Denmark that includes a design school, two art museums, a sculpture park, a Jørn Utzon prototype building, various large scale public art works, and a stunning work of landscape by Danish landscape architect C. T.h. Sørensen. Sørensen's "Geomtric Garden" is definitely the highlight of the area. A series of hedges in geomtric shapes create beautiful green outdoor rooms...the height of some of the tree-formed hedges are amazing! Most of the rooms are completely closed (as in a complete oval) with only two small people-sized openings and maybe one bench.
The museums are a bit underwhelming--and maybe this is the reason for a new one--being built by U.S. architect Steven Holl. The new Herning Art Museum or Heart, is about half-way built, and I was able to wander around (there are no gates or fences at many Danish construction sites) the raw spaces that will eventually house art works. For the geeks: Its built in pre-cast concrete with funky steel-trussed curvy roof planes. The photo above shows, I'm guessing, one of the large--open plan gallery spaces. Very promising. Link to the Heart website here.



These great roadside attractions were consistently the view from my rental car window.




Two Seas Meet
At the northern most tip of Denmark (see the map above) it is possible to walk all the way out to the last bit of land on the peninsula. This is where the North Sea meets the Baltic in an elemental clash of waves. The Danes refer to the two colliding water bodies by there names as straits (the Skagerrak and the Kattegat) instead of the two oceans... which, I guess, is a more local way of relating...