Newspaper Article

Sublimity under a northern sky

Heathcote, Edwin

2008

Overview

We have become so used to the gallery embedded in the fabric of the city that to approach a museum deep in the Danish countryside becomes a disconcerting experience. Contemporary art itself, with its installations, its geometric forms and mini-cities, veering between the minimal and the splashes of urban street art, is profoundly a part of the city. But the [Fuglsang] concentrates on the sweep of Danish art, particularly the romantic Nordic landscape and the sublime; it is a building rooted in the rural and the landscape, both inside and out. Situated on the island of Lolland, a couple of hours south of Copenhagen, the Fuglsang is a rare and unexpected delight. It was designed by Tony Fretton, who, for more than two decades has been Britain's finest and most subtly inventive architect. His Lisson Gallery in London was perhaps the city's most sophisticated urban intervention of the late 20th century, a robust, irregular and almost musically eloquent structure that managed to make sense of a context that embraced concrete towers and Georgian terraces. The context of the Fuglsang could not be more different. The corridor terminates in a room-from-which-to-contemplate-the-landscape. A domestically scaled room with large windows (as opposed to a glass box), this is the most remarkable space. So much of the art in the museum focuses on the landscape that it allows your eyes to readjust to the real thing. It put me in mind of the sky-room at New York's New Museum (by Japanese architects SANAA), an uber-urban room in which the city and the sky are brought into the foreground, into the museum. At Fuglsang, too, it is the vast northern sky with its fast-changing canvas of clouds and beams of hopeful sunshine that engrosses you, that imposes the same awed quiet as does New York's almost geological skyline.

• Publisher: The Financial Times Limited
• Subject: Architects / Architecture / Fretton, Tony / Museums