The Cisterns

Cisternerne - Museum of Modern Glass Art, Frederiksberg

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen in cisterns

3rd Feb 2011 - 27th November 2011

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen in Cisternerne is a large exhibition where the sculptures will find their rightful place in an architecture with its rawness, dark, reflections and dripping walls play in harmony with the works. Ten new reliefs: "While we are - until we were" presented as raw patches of time and in their expression, they draw on both Gothic and medieval, while they appear quite modern and speak directly into our time as a comment to the media chamber of horrors.

There are few exhibition spaces as special as The Cisterns in Søndermarken in Copenhagen. And there are few artists who create works that would suit the dripping wet underground halls as beautifully as Jorgen Haugen Sorensen is doing it. Here, high above the capital, who - in the middle of the 1800s exploded out of the ramparts, a giant water reservoir was placed - which until 1933 supplied Copenhagen with fresh water. But even though the Cisterns three chambers have been drained since 1996, the water still finds its way down there. Which fits Haugen Sorensen's sculptures perfectly.

It means that the surface of the ten bronze reliefs, which have the common title 'While we are - till we were', is almost crackling when fine water droplets roll along the exposed skulls and cascades of bones. The series seems to be a black counterpart to the white, but no less violent, carving, Haugen Sørensen last year did for the High Court. And the theme is, as so often in Haugen Sorensens works, the transformation from living to dead ...