Northern lights

The best known contemporary Danish artist is undoubtedly painter and sculptor, Per Kirkeby. It is a long time since we have seen his work in this country, and it is mystifying why the organisers of the current festival of Danish culture, Out Of Denmark, didn't take the opportunity to bring over a substantial exhibition of his work. But then, contemporary visual art has simply not been given top billing in the festival, to judge by the lack of promotion accorded an outstanding show of contemporary Danish painting at the Guinness Hop Store. About Painting features the work of five painters based in Copenhagen. All of them are established artists (none of them is under the age of 40) and, on the admittedly limited evidence of this one group show, three of them are exceptionally good painters. Kehnet Nielsen and Peter Mandrup are particularly interesting, and Preben Fjederholt also looks formidable.

All three are tonal painters, and it would be easy to underestimate the role of colour in their work but while it is subtle, it is important. They all show considerable expertise in developing ranges of greys. The surfaces of Nielsen's big compositions look as though they are accumulated from numerous torn layers. Powerful, moody textural expanses of dragged and scraped pigment, they could be notional maps, particularly given his use of typography. One of his pieces employs nuances of luscious grey-greens to terrific effect. Mandrup is altogether different. His surfaces are light, fluid and freely brushed. Dark grey linear scaffolds inscribed on minimally inflected creamy grounds resemble decayed or fragmented grids. Or the clustered lines might be stabs at demarcating a subject against a background. The paintings are made with a wonderful, spontaneous sense of touch and with exemplary restraint - he knows when to leave well enough alone.

Fjederholt paints city panoramas. Cityscape Night, for example, is a field of soft, velvety, smokey blue against which blocks of paler tone imply the networks of streets, buildings and street-lights. It is richly atmospheric and beautifully painted, well worth a close look because, as with the others, it is work that looks better in reality than reproduction. The other two exhibitors, Christopher Galvin-Harrison and Peter Martensen are both estimable artists, though the former's employment of formalised blocks of colour can be heavy-handed, and the latter's slick, photographic flower bouquets work instantaneously but then tend to tail off. About Painting is augmented by a one-person show of paintings by Jens Birkemose at Jorgensen Fine Art. The pictures are as frenetic, improvisatory and jazzy as graffiti art. Dark but brilliantly lit, they are like stained glass, with bursts of harsh, almost luminous colour. Birkemose piles up layer on layer of interlocking, overlapping marks and images in harsh, jarring combinations. Sometimes it's all too much, but for the most part he gets away with it.

Something of the historical background to this contemporary work is provided by the National Gallery exhibition, Kroyer and the Artists' Colony at Skagen. This includes the most famous painting in Denmark, Kroyer's melancholy self-portrait in which, accompanied by his wife, Marie, and faithful dog, Rap, he idles on the beach at Skagen at twilight. But why do they look so glum? We now know that Kroyer was probably a manic depressive, that Marie wasn't the most cheerful soul either, and that she was to leave him for a womanising Swedish composer. Kroyer was the most prominent of the Skagen painters, the school of genre and landscape painters who congregated at the northernmost point of Jutland and were influenced by the plein air painters of France. They were not the only ones.

One of the National Gallery's most popular exhibitions ever was The Irish Impressionists, which featured the work of the Irish painters who similarly made the pilgrimage to France and took to painting out-of-doors. As the curator of that show, Julian Campbell, was at pains to point out, the title is a misnomer. Neither the French painters who inspired them nor the Irish were actually Impressionists. That was happening elsewhere. And the same is true of the Danish artists.

Their work is more conservative and cautious. This is evident in big, schematic figure compositions like Kroyer's At The Grocer's Store, when there is no fishing, or Michael Ancher's Fishermen setting a rowboat in the water. They are both good, solidly crafted examples of 19th-century narrative painting, with a wealth of documentary detail.

The sea breezes of Skagen certainly blew away some of the cobwebs of genre convention that characterise a great deal of the work. Carl Locher's view of a beached rowing boat surrounded by a lively froth of surf has something of Gustave Courbet's directness and physicality. Kroyer himself became interested in the atmospherics of the brilliant light generated by the vast expanses of sand and sea. A local artist, Anne Ancher, painted mainly indoors but she too was sensitive to, and captivated by, the light. Her Interior: Brondum's Annexe captures the radiance of two newly built, still deserted rooms. She concentrated on moments of domestic routine, which lends her work a timeless quality. The show is carefully selected, extremely well laid out and accompanied by a fine catalogue with illustrations of exceptional quality.

About Painting is at the Guinness Hop Store until November 12th. Jens Birkemose is at the Jorgensen Fine Art until November 8th. Kroyer and the Artists' Colony at Skagen is at the National Gallery of Ireland until January 3rd.