laidbackliving

4 days in Copenhagen and what’s not to like - the city has clean streets with benches, green spaces and playgrounds. Travelling is a truly extraordinary integrated bike/train experience, excellent clean and punctual transportation, with beautiful highly formal/folk architecture, bold physical signage/typography, and great art galleries. The food and beer is fresh interesting and feels like it’s doing you good. Apart from hanging out we went to some stunning art spaces. Getting out to Arken was fantastic. The work of Patricia Piccinini is so other - disturbing in its ability to seem so familiar and yet not, transgressing all sorts of liminal spaces. The gallery has a great cafe overlooking the sand dunes and sea, sited art in the landscape and an aesthetically pleasingly designed power station bathed in sunshine. The exhibition at salon 57 by Bob Bicknell Knight was solid and challenged notions of privacy. https://www.facebook.com/events/1309241795892568/  We had seen the work of Jesper Just at Palais d Tokyo but it was great to see it in the formal white space of Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Good to see Der Lauf der Dinge by Fischli and Weiss. It is such a winner and always a pleasure to come across. An exhibition about Europe was painfully embarrassing as a UK citizen but it had good work by amongst others juergan Teller and the bookshop has a great selection. Getting into the flooded underground space at Cisternerne to see the work of Superflex was a real gem of a find, the space delivers an experience and is a real treat, not in this show but check out the film where they flood a Macdonald’s is alarming.  https://vimeo.com/2966602  Copenhagen Contemporary had three large shows that were obviously excessively budgeted for but at the same time they felt slightly unnecessary. It’s a huge warehouse space surrounded by more abandoned yet cleverly rethought casual spaces that appears to have no formal structure or purpose, sitting and eating out is a joy here like everywhere else, lines are blurred and everybody seems really nice and positive. Cycling everywhere is a pleasure. At night Christiania was an interesting space to hang out. Late night motorised scooter action hire around Cykelslangen was fun until a crash resulted in a sore head, ribs and heavy bleeding! We shall be back.....