HUMLEBÆK.- Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark presents the first retrospective museum exhibition of the American artist Kaari Upson (1970-2021). Despite her all-too brief career, Upson can be regarded as a future classic, whose work continues to resonate in contemporary art. She left behind a rich, highly personal body of work investigating identity, the body, illness and loss.


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From 2005 until her untimely passing in 2021, Kaari Upson pursued her practice with tremendous intensity. The exhibition, in the Louisiana’s South Wing, is the first retrospective of the artist’s work. Showcasing the multifaceted strength of her work, the exhibition fulfils the museum's ambition to introduce Upson as an unsung classic. Before her death, Upson had established herself as one of the most distinctive and versatile American artists of her time, working across sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Her stand-out blend of painting and sculpture is assertive and never not aesthetic.

Everything in Upson’s oeuvre revolves around identity, playing out in a transgressive network of objects and people. It is unmistakably American. Yet by framing identity as an enigmatic blend of fact and fiction, her work is universal. The exhibition’s title, Dollhouse, refers to a key work and to how Upson, weaving in and out of her art, plays the parts of both puppeteer and puppet.

Her best-known work, The Larry Project (2005-2012), merges aspects of her own life with those of a neighbour she never met. His abandoned belongings inspired Larry, a character with echoes of Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner. The works in this series include a heavy dose of voyeurism on the part of the artist, though she always invests herself, too. Employing forensic methods, Upson even hints at a relationship between herself and the character of Larry, as we witness the project’s violent unravelling.

Growing up in San Bernardino, near Los Angeles, fuels Upson’s artistic investigations into the underbelly of society. Both literally and metaphorically, her sculptures, drawings and paintings collapse the separation between inner life and outer world, as she continually seeks to find new connections between individual and community. At the end, as her health declines, her own past and upbringing take centre stage and are scrutinised.

Though not always easily decoded, Upson’s work expresses profoundly human concerns. Domestic objects and architecture are given bodily qualities, embedding thoughts and traumas. As human beings caught between life and death, we are subject to our own and history’s dramas, where bodies are at once beautiful, violent, toxic and at times repulsive. This is a central tenet of Upson’s work, connecting with the tradition of artists like Louise Bourgeois, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Cindy Sherman.

The exhibition will travel to Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany and MASI Lugano in Switzerland.

Curator: Anders Kold.



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