From a Norwegian sculpture park to a London street

From a Norwegian sculpture park to a London street

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and a hidden Scottish gem, alfresco art is increasingly popular. Andrew Dickson explores why, in the open air, art comes alive.
n these pandemic-stricken January days, bright spots are hard to find. Particularly if you're the type who generally gets through the winter by booking as much theatre as possible, making plentiful cinema dates, scouting out new bars and restaurants, and seeing every art show in the calendar. The museum and gallery closures seem especially cruel: although institutions around the world have done everything possible to become Covid-secure, many have been closed for several months at a time. Some haven't reopened since last March.

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However, some art spaces are experiencing a resurgence – ones that don't have walls or roofs. Whereas indoor exhibition teams have had to work around ever-changing sanitation, social distancing, infection tracking and ventilation regulations – or simply last-minute closures – in the open air things are infinitely freer. Just as parks or the countryside have become the only way for millions to socialise during the pandemic, sculpture gardens, arboretums and outdoor galleries have been the places many of us feel comfortable seeing art.
Whether it's community-led, pop-up installations in cities, repurposed riverside walks or major museums taking over advertising hoardings – as Britain's National Portrait Gallery did recently with its pandemic-themed group photography show Hold Still – there has been an exciting sense of experimentation in the art world. Historic sculpture gardens in Japan have welcomed new visitors; artists in Kigali, Rwanda, have been creating murals to promote anti-coronavirus health messages; and a political work by Nick Cave is to be reinstalled on the front of the Brooklyn Museum. Might this be the time that we start to appreciate the power of open-air culture, even in the middle of winter?
One man who certainly believes more of us need to brave the elements is Jarle Strømodden – who, admittedly, has skin in the game. As director of the Gustav Vigeland Museum in Oslo, he's not only responsible for Vigeland's former apartment and studio, occupied by the sculptor from 1924 until his death in 1943, but a huge sculpture park on the edges of the city, one of the city's signature attractions.
More than 80 acres in size, the park holds over 200 of Vigeland's monumental sculptures, making it perhaps the world's largest installation devoted to the work of a single artist. "There is nowhere entirely like it, I think," Strømodden says when we talk over Zoom one dark winter afternoon. Located in Frogner Park, the sprawling grounds of a former manor, the Vigelandslegget became a life's obsession for the artist, who by the 1920s was Norway's most renowned sculptor (internationally, he is largely known for designing the surprisingly rugged-looking medal for the Nobel Peace Prize). Invited to design a fountain by the city authorities, Vigeland agreed on the condition that he would also be permitted to create landscape features including gates and bridges – which over the years swelled to encompass a vast suite of his own bronze and Iddefjord granite sculptures, arranged in a faintly mystical configuration. "My own feeling is that the theme is the circle of life," says Strømodden.

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The centrepiece of everything is the Monolith Plateau: a towering granite column on which 121 writhing human figures are incised, surrounded by other sculptures. Seventeen metres (55ft) high, the monolith attracts visitors from across the world, and is a proud symbol for Norwegians. Depending on your sensibility, you might find it awe-inspiring or a little sinister.
"We are really part of the fabric of the city," says Strømodden, pointing out that – unlike the museum itself – the park is free and open 24 hours a day, all year round, irrespective of weather (and, yes, of Covid).
"In the spring and summer, with the fountains on, it's just so beautiful. And though in the winter the colour of the trees goes, you see the bronze and the stone next to the snow. Every single day there is something different."
Streets ahead
In London, photographers Donna Travis and Wayne R Crichlow don't have snow to contend with (or at least not regularly) – for them the issue is traffic. Based in one of the city's most diverse boroughs, they have recently installed a photography exhibition on one of Hackney's busiest thoroughfares, next to a medical centre and around the corner from one of London's most bustling markets. Entitled Ridley Road Stories, it's a series of 10 large-format portraits celebrating Hackney's Afro-Caribbean community. The images were shot only a few hundred metres away – street photography in every sense of the word.
"It's great if you want to reach a wide audience," yells Travis as a lorry honks past. "You see people in double-decker buses peering down, wondering what's going on."
As we walk towards Ridley Road itself, the pair explain their project's community focus. It began a few years back, when Future Hackney – an artist-led collective – began to document the area, which just a decade ago was London's most deprived borough, and the sixth most deprived local authority in the UK. As well as encouraging street photographers to make work in the market, for many years a locus for the black, Turkish, Afghan and many other communities, they also set up temporary photo studios and darkrooms, working with young photographers and video-makers.