Notes from My Travel Notebook: Brandts Photography Museum

Side Trips from Odense – Photo Ops

We planned to go to Brandts in the evening, since it was free from 5-9 pm, and Henrik (our guide in Odense) was treating us afterwards to a Danish dinner at his friend Torben’s house.

Brandts is a beautiful building, perfect for displaying art, with high ceilings and natural lighting and white walls. Its claim to fame is its collection of photography – which was impressive – but it also had some great exhibits. One of my favorites was one called “Magic Kingdom” where you went through some dark curtains through a garden of glass and light flowers – kind of like in Avatar – and came through the other side to a gigantic three dimensional wall hanging of valkyrie fiber art and textiles that took up an entire room.

In one room, the exhibit was called “World in My Eyes” and everything in it contained art that was, at first glance, not what you expected. On the floor in the back was a long, strange expanse of tin foil, that didn’t look like anything until you read the description that explained that the artist had made fragile impressions in the foil to represent an execution site that represented a brutal part of Danish contemporary history.

The most interesting part of the tour was the splash paintings, which I saw many people walk by, dismissing (my kid could paint those...) and I didn’t notice much about them myself until Keighley came back the other way and said, “I love these!” and when I asked her why, she went into great detail about the colors used in them and the way the artist had made clear choices in each of them, and when I went back to look at the description on the wall, I saw that each painting had a different story in them. Also, piped in above the ceiling was the sound of the artist as she was working on the paintings, the sound of her breathing, and the sound of the brush going across the canvas as she worked. The whole thing was very effective when you actually stopped, and really took a moment to really look at each painting.

Afterwards, we all went to Torben’s house and had a Danish feast that would have put Babette to shame – herring and shrimp and meatballs and roast pork and potato salad and snaps and beer and rødgrød med fløde :) It was a great ending to our stay in Odense. Tomorrow, we leave for Copenhagen.

 

 

 

 

The descriptions that went with the paintings on the wall