In 2016, Danish art collector, curator, and bon vivant Jens-Peter Brask made the bold move to end his former career as a restauranteur, surrendering security to use his organizational skills in a new way—crafting public art experiences that create new connections. By the end of 2019, Brask had organized a massive outdoor mural gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark, each after another from a new world-renowned name and unique artistic approach.
Over Zoom, Brask admitted to his social streak, but maintained that he’s very private off the clock. The curator is a renowned collector who began amassing work around the time he began writing graffiti, as a small town teenager growing up on Copenhagen’s outskirts.
“At that age, you just want to be a rebel,” Brask recalled. He grew addicted to the intoxicating anticipation of arriving to Copenhagen proper by train. “Graffiti came to Europe in the mid-80s,” Brask said. By his estimate, it began showing up in Denmark around 1984. The fledgling creative took a sheen to spray paint’s edgy appeal, unavoidable as the city’s trains were doused with the stuff.
He began writing graffiti in 1986. “I was really bad in the beginning,” Brask intimated. “It grew and I became a little bit better.”
“I didn’t expect that I should be an artist,” he said. “I did it because I really loved it. I still do.” Brask quit the game in 1994 when he graduated into adulthood with intention and began opening his own businesses. “Be an adult, don’t get arrested running around at nighttime,” the newly-minted man told himself. “It’s a part of me,” he explained, “because that was where all the art started.”
Graffiti’s lust for risk and reward embodied principles that would sustain Brask throughout his career. He took the energy and ran with it, devoting his next 22 years to the nightclubs and beach bars and cafes he owned around his home city. Not bad for a small-town kid.
“It was hard work for many years,” Brask said. One beach club he owned was open from April to September, from 7am to midnight. “If the sun was shining, then we had guests in the restaurants and I had to be there,” he said. When he sold the restaurants in his early 40s to re-tool his career towards art, his relief outweighed the risk. He doesn’t harbor one ounce of regret.
By 2016, graffiti and street art had grown from counterculture rebellion to worldwide phenomenon. Keith Haring and Basquiat fetched fine art prices at auction. Brask was surprised by the development.
Street art establishes stronger connections with larger audiences simply by virtue of its scale and location. Brask added that the content and tone of many murals enhance their mass appeal. “There’s a lot of energy in the works, and there’s a lot of humor as well,” he mused. “Sometimes it’s really easy. You get what you see, it’s not that complicated.”
In 2016, Brask planned to work with Kenny Scharf in Copenhagen, but they were missing their facade. He reached out to his network and one friend suggested he consider Nordvest, the trendy, emergent part of town comparable to Brooklyn’s infamous Bushwick. By the end of 2017, Brask and his partners had facilitated five murals in the area. The next year, Brask continued alone, completing eight more. By the end of 2019, Nordvest was home to sixteen murals from a hard-hitting international lineup. Per his initial agreement with the buildings’ owners, these murals will stay up for at least eight years.
The resulting open air gallery covers character design and landscapes and even painterly architectonics. While the murals are all utterly individual in terms of appearance, their canvases are standardized. Each mural lives on the end of an identical residential co-op. Some artists chose to cover the pale yellow paint originally coating these canvases, but others allowed a bit to show through. Brask likes the mixture, likes that little bits of the old history still breathe alongside the new.
Brask told me that Copenhagen has a rich and energetic street art scene, but his curation at Nordvest is “kind of the Rolls Royce of the murals in Copenhagen.” It might not be the most important attraction in the city due to its young age, but it is the most expansive collection of large-scale works in one compact space. “We have a pretty big scene here,” Brask said. “A lot of people really love it and want to be a part of this.”
“The work that we do is is not like everybody else’s, the way we can combine things,” he continued. Rather than getting caught up in an academic approach, Brask allows his efforts to unfold empirically. He knows artists and knows what he likes. He knows what his clients want. He knows what works together.
“I don’t care that much about what people are thinking and saying, I’m just doing it,” Brask noted. Nordvest is just the largest example of what Brask plans to drive at throughout his career. “Last year, we did a venue like Madison Square Garden, just on a smaller scale,” he said. “We did seven murals on that building. We also did five or six other murals last year. This year, we are starting on something new.”
Like the artists he works with, Brask is an innate risk taker. “It’s not like I want to put all my money on crypto tomorrow,” he qualified, “But yeah, I do think risks are important because it’s interesting to take chances and put art together that you normally don’t see together. I think it’s very important because if you just do the normal routine, then it will get boring.” Always onto more sophisticated risks, higher yields, like a muralist taking on a new challenge or a graffiti writer trying to get up hotter than ever before.
