Projects

Design for a large exhibition showcasing more than 100 paintings juxtaposing Dutch 17th century art with the era known as the Danish Golden Age – the first half of the 19th century – at The Nivaagaard Painting Collection.

The focus of the exhibition is the style known as “genre painting”, which as opposed to historical or religious painting depicts normal people in scenes and situations from everyday life.

Many of the paintings depict people looking through or sitting by a window. For this reason the window itself became a motif in the exhibition design, as holes in the new walls, framing the view and connecting the artworks on either side of the wall.

As the exhibition relies heavily on borrowing masterpieces from international collections, a big obstacle was securing proper safety distance between the works and the museum guests.

We turned this to our advantage and created large skirting elements along all boundary walls with an angled face to display text at a comfortable viewing angle. In the same manner, all new walls were designed with a large foot element for stability and distance, and an angled face for text display.

The many pictures are hung on the walls in a playful manner, to highlight the commonplace and often satirical situations being depicted.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

Exhibition design for the show “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction” at Rungstedlund, the historical home of Danish author Karen Blixen. The show exhibits decoupages and drawings by Her Majesty The Queen of Denmark Margrethe II.

Her Majesty The Queen designed the scenography and costumes for the 2023 Bille August feature film “Ehrengard”. The Queen created a vast number of découpages in her work for the film, as a means to visualize the fairy tale world of the Karen Blixen novella that the movie was based on.

As part of the exhibition design we designed custom book tables, frames, and easels as well as stools and benches.

All furniture was built by Rammelisten in ash wood, treated with pigmented linseed oil.

Graphic design was done by Studio Atlant.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

“Fynboerne – Kunsten frem for alt” / “Art Above All” about the turn-of-the-century group of painters from the Danish island of Funen at Kunstmuseum Brandts.

The show focuses on three of the central couples from the movement: The Larsens, The Swanes, and the Sybergs.

It examined the different conditions the wife and the husband would have to create their art under, and the effect this would have in their choices of motif and scale of the artworks.

The walls were painted in richly textured paints and clad with wooden strips imitating wall mouldings, to create an atmosphere apt for this specific era.

We re-discovered a range of display cabinets from the original Fyns Kunstmuseum, one of the first buildings in Denmark to be built solely for the purpose of being an art museum. A selection of letters and family photos were displayed in these.

The show was curated by Thorlak Madsen as part of a PhD research project.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

Restoration and renovation of a listed apartment in the center of Copenhagen.

The building is part of a larger scheme developed by renowned historicist architect Ferdinand Meldahl in the late 19th Century.

The last time the apartment had been redone was in the 1990s, with a lot of design choices typical of that era. The wish of the client was to bring back the original 1870s charm of the place. Luckily a lot of it was still there, only buried beneath the newer layers – such as the original plank floors that we discovered underneath a 90s parquet flooring.

A lot of bespoke details were designed by us for the place, such as brass and bronze hardware for the cabinets, and kitchen and bathroom furniture.

As part of the restoration all the plasterwork details were stripped of 150 years worth of paint coats and left unpainted.

For the bathroom floors we did a pattern of intarsia brass ornaments, based on an ornament found in the fence around the neighboring Marble Church, also designed by Meldahl.

The finished bathrooms are a mix of terrazzo, ceramic, Carrara marble, elm and brass.

Furniture was built in European elm, and kitchen and other cabinetry in Danish ash wood.

For the kitchen walls, antique Delft tiles were mixed in with newly manufactured ceramic tiles, also from Delft.

All work was done in collaboration with the carpenters and cabinet makers of Rammelisten.

Photos by Peter Dalsgaard.

Design for a large exhibition about national icon Marie Krøyer at Skagens Museum and The Hirschsprung Collection.

The prevailing narrative around the turn-of-the-century artist has been that “what a pity it was that she quit painting”. And while she did quit painting, she didn’t quit creating.

Instead Marie Krøyer focused on other crafts and became, among other things, an interior designer before there even was such a term. The exhibition shines a light on exactly that by showcasing Krøyer’s furniture and interior design skills alongside her drawings.

To that end we had three exquisitely detailed architectural models built of three of Marie Krøyer’s own homes, by a team of students from Aarhus School of Architecture.

Drawing inspiration from Marie Krøyer’s signature cloverleaf motif we designed two wallpaper patterns for the exhibition. In the end, only one of them was used, hand-painted by Copenhagen Signs for the show at Hirschsprung.

The two locations of the exhibition, Skagen and Hirschsprung, had very different exhibition spaces at their disposal – one is a turn-of-the-century gallery (Hirschsprung), whereas the other is a contemporary white-cube space (Skagen). This meant that we had to come up with two very different spatial concepts for the two versions of the show.

At Skagen we wanted to do a domestic, rooms-en-suite situation, and create an intimacy which we felt was lacking in the space and would fit the theme and the artworks very well.

We designed a wall installation with door openings arranged to create a feeling of looking from one space through another and in to a room further away.

At Hirschsprung we flipped the idea on its head by painting the spaces white, thereby creating more of a clean gallery space in these otherwise richly detailed museum rooms.

We also designed cloverleaf stools that ended up not being built.

All visualizations are from the Skagen version of the show.

All photos from Hirschsprung by David Stjernholm.

An archaeopteryx is the first known bird species and thought to be the link between the dinosaurs and modern day birds. Only 12 known fossils exist of it. Knuthenborg Evolution Museum owns one of these, specimen no. 8, and we were asked to design a special display cabinet for it.

The finished design borrows details from the memorial stones of Danish Neo-classical sculptor Johannes Wiedevelt found on many Danish manor estates.

Covering the cabinet is a text with quotes from Darwin describing the fossil and the story behind it, hand-painted by Copenhagen Signs.

The specimen itself is mounted in a polished brass mount inside a brightly colored textile-clad cabinet space.

The cabinet was built by Rammelisten and is on permanent display at Knuthenborg Evolution Museum in on Lolland in Southern Denmark.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

The exhibition “Tradition is Contemporary” at The National Crafts Museum in New Delhi opened in November 2022 and was curated and staged by us. The show brings 13 Danish artisans, artists and designers working with textiles to India, and juxtaposes them with the museum’s vast collection of artifacts of great craftsmanship.

The exhibition showcases more than 100 years of Danish textile tradition and tries to show how dichotomies between old and new – traditional and contemporary – don’t really hold up any more. In stead we strive to showcase how objects and ideas can migrate while travelling across different cultures and times. The next big thing was in the past.

Participating artists were:

Malene Bach (1967-)
Ragna Braase (1929-2013)
Freya Dalsjø (1989-)
Bitten Hegelund (1960-)
Vibeke Klint (1927-2019)
Marie Gudme Leth (1895-1997)
Jan Machenhauer (1954-)
Margrethe Odgaard (1978-)
Anne Fabricius Møller (1959-)
Vibeke Rohland (1957-)
Ebbe Stub-Wittrup (1973-)
Paula Trock (1889-1979)
Hanne Vedel (1933)

All signage was hand-painted by Arif Khan.

The earliest pieces in the exhibition were these specimens (left, above) found in the National Archives, Copenhagen, of textile samples transported from India to Denmark on merchant’s ships between 1788-1817. The title of the show resulted from opening up these boxes of very old textiles and realizing that they all seemed so contemporary! For the show we had a few of them redone by block-printers from Rajasthan and used them throughout the space for the set design. For instance as cushions on the stools we had made, or for the binding of the catalog. The stool is based on an old Danish milking stool – re-interpreted by the museum’s team of carpenters.

Bitten Hegelund, textile-printer, above. Ragna Braase, Margrethe Odgaard, Vibeke Klint and Anne Fabricius Møller seen below.

Fashion-designer Jan Machenhauer seen above. Vibeke Klint, Malene Bach, Ebbe Stub-Wittrup and Ragna Braase seen below.

Anne Fabricius Møller, Vibeke Rohland And Bitten Hegelund above. Vibeke Rohland, Bitten Hegelund, Hanne Vedel and Paula Trock below.

Modernist textile-printer Marie Gudme Leth above. Hanne Vedel, Paula Trock, Freya Dalsjø and Ragna Braase below.

All installation views by Jeetin Sharma. Archive samples documented by Torben Eskerod.

A tsuba is the round piece of metal that separates the shaft from the blade of a traditional samurai sword. It is also a valued collectible artifact in its own right, that along with netsukes and ceramic jars form the core of many decorative arts museums’ collections of Japanese crafts.

Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen holds not only one, but two whole collections of tsubas. One, the Halberstadt Collection, has been shown in Kaare Klint’s iconic drawer displays since the 1950s whereas the other one, the Pietro Krohn Collection, had never been displayed in its entirety until the recent reopening of the museum.

For that purpose we were commissioned to design a display that could exhibit the scale and intricacy of this forgotten collection, and for us it was also a chance to enter into a dialog with Kaare Klint’s original design of the entire museum as well as his well-known displays. The result is this large table in walnut with ebony detailing, that exhibits the 275 tsubas seemingly floating, casting an intricate pattern on the floor under the right lighting conditions.

The project combines some of the things that interest us the most: uncovering layers upon layers of narratives and references and giving them form through a close collaboration with knowledgeable researchers and highly skilled craftspeople.

Photos by David Stjernholm.

Ejnar Nielsen (1872-1956) was one of the clearest Danish exponents of the artistic movement known as “Symbolism”. His paintings are often dark or bleak, depicting ill or otherwise unfortunate souls, on canvases of a monumental scale.

The Hirschsprung Collection in central Copenhagen, one of the nation’s most important museums for turn-of-the-century art, in 2022 produced a large solo exhibition for the artist, the show “Ejnar Nielsen – Signs of Life” for which we did the exhibition design.

To allow for paintings of this monumental scale, the museum moved their permanent collection out of the main halls. A new dark color-scheme was applied to all of the mouldings and wall faces. We also had a text frieze revealing passages from the artist’s love letters to his sweetheart hand-painted below the plaster cornice encompassing each room.

Symbolism was closely linked to the Danish Arts-and-Crafts equivalent movement known as “Skønvirke”. For this reason we designed stools and display tables re-interpreting Skønvirke details.

As part of the exhibition, the museum did a collaboration with The Danish Association for the Blind – many of Ejnar Nielsen’s subjects were the blind inhabitants from the village of Gjern, so throughout the exhibition are interviews with blind or visually impaired people, describing different concepts relating to blindness and visual art. To add to this, we studded the stools and display tables with text bites in Braille lettering – both as an ornamental feature, but also as an extra communicating layer for those who use their fingertips to read.

One of Ejnar Nielsen most famous works is the painting “The Blind Girl” depicting a young woman standing in front of a meandering creek set in lustrous gold leaf. To emphasize the importance of this piece we proposed gilding the wall that the painting was mounted on. The result can be seen below.

The exhibition ran from August 22 – December 15 2023.

All photos by Laura Stamer.

Exhibition concept and design for the alternative art fair AltCph. In 2018 the focus of the fair was performance art.

In close collaboration with curators Anna Weile Kjær and Esben Weile Kjær, we designed the space to mimic the quintessential art fair with a wall-to-wall carpet and a structure of temporary booths – only the walls themselves were missing, leaving just the drywall structure behind.

The exhibition was documented before and after the fact, the first set of images showing the clean structure and the props from the performances, while the second set looks like the day after a very big party.

Instead of signs or title cards a funeral-style bouquet of flowers was left at the site of each of the performances, the silk ribbon bearing the name of the artist in question.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

An Asian-inspired diner in Berlin’s Mitte district, founded by Vietnamese-German Thu Thuy Pham and Thao Westphal. For the design, inspiration was drawn from Japanese kissatens as well as the Hong Kong café culture. The walls feature ash wood paneling with custom light fixtures, interspersed with a Swedish lamp from 1950s and classic restaurant dinner ware – mixing time periods and geographical places true to the nature of the varied origins of the place.

Photos by Desiree Kastull and Kaputt Agency

New furniture for the permanent collection of Kunstmuseum Brandts. The daybeds and ottomans were built by Rammelisten using ash wood with elm detailing.

All upholstery by Kvadrat.

Photos by David Stjernholm.

Renovation as well as design and art curation for the official residence of the Danish Prime Minister, Marienborg. The 18th century manor house was thoroughly renovated with a focus on bringing back traditional details as well as creating new ones.

For each room throughout the house, a mix of historical pieces of furniture along with newly commisioned pieces by a range of Danish designers and artists were added.

The project was done by Mathias Mentze in collaboration with Nikolaj Lorentz Mentze.

Photos by Simon Knuds

A sourdough bakery in the heart of Berlin Mitte developed in collaboration with Danish chef Frederik Bille-Brahe and German hospitality group Slow.

We developed the concept and the design of all elements, surfaces, and furniture, which was all built by carpenters using solid elm wood.

The stool designed for the project is available for purchase through our webshop.

Photos by Volker Conrad for Sofi Bakery.

Sketch proposal for the 2017 Danh Vo exhibition “Take My Breath Away” at the National Gallery in Copenhagen (SMK).

A project for a new single-family home in the suburbs North of Copenhagen.

A library for a private home in Copenhagen. Everything is constructed in solid elm by local carpenter Rammelisten.

The carved pattern on the fronts was inspired by traditional adze carvings, but manufactured using modern CNC-milling techniques.

Renovation and transformation of a former apartment in collaboration with the Frama team, to be used as their office.

Most of the work consisted of removing years and years of bad design decisions, for instance stripping down all the wallpaper, which revealed an unexpected and beautiful original color scheme underneath.

Exhibition design for the Landscapes exhibition at Kunstmuseum Brandts, showcasing 250 years of interpretations of the Danish landscape through painting, sculpture and photo.

As a part of the show we designed a meandering bench motif treated with the traditional red color “Dyrehave Red”, known from signage and gates of the national Danish forests.

Project for the transformation of a former brickwork keeper’s house on the Northern coast of the Danish island of Falster.

There was a story that one of Per Kirkeby’s very first brick sculptures was erected in the garden here, a claim that seemed un-documentable as it had left no visible traces – until we recently discovered two photos of it in an old book about Per Kirkeby:

The fact holds no actual relation to the project as such, but it becomes a part of the mythology of a place. It feels significant.

New café and outdoor seating area for the art institution Den Frie in Copenhagen. Among the interventions is the reproduction of an 1890s rattan chair designed for the museum back then.

We also designed octogonal side tables inspired by the shape of the sculpture room at the museum, as well as Pegasus neon signage inspired by one of the first posters for the museum, painted by J. F. Willumsen in 1891.