COPENHAGEN.- Anna Thommesen created colours and patterns inspired by nature. Over the course of five decades, she wove a series of exceptional abstract works. A major new exhibition at SMK brings her life’s work into the spotlight once again.

On 7 February 2026, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark opened the most comprehensive exhibition to date featuring the Danish visual artist Anna Thommesen (1908–2004).

The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book Anna Thommesen – Weavings, featuring contributions by Dorthe Aagesen and Anders Gaardboe Jensen (eds.), Lynne Cooke, Mark Mussari, Philip Pihl, Ane Preisler Skovgaard, and Karen Vad.

Through a series of essays, the book offers nuanced insight into Thommesen’s artistic practice and discusses her place in art history in light of the textile medium’s significance within twentieth-century visual art. The book is richly illustrated with photographs of Thommesen’s various works and public commissions, biographical material, pattern designs, watercolour sketches, and colour samples.

Her abstract weavings constitute an exceptional contribution to Danish modernist art. Yet her name is not widely known today, neither in Denmark nor internationally. To remedy this, SMK and Holstebro Kunstmuseum – home to a substantial part of Thommesen’s oeuvre – have joined forces to create Anna Thommesen – Weavings, an exhibition that presents the full breadth of her artistic practice.

It began with nature

Anna Thommesen was a singular figure on the Danish art scene. She began her career as a painter, but around 1940 she set aside her brushes in favour of the loom. For five decades she worked with abstract subject matter while using ancient hand-weaving techniques and yarns she dyed herself.

At a time when avant-garde movements set the agenda in fine art and design, she insisted on following her own path. Nature was her point of departure and, in a conversation with journalist Karen Vad in 1985, she explained how nature had inspired her to weave in the first place:

‘I was walking along a field of barley, almost ripe, and the grain shimmered with this bluish sheen; never quite yellow, more a greenish hue. I thought it was so beautiful, and I wanted to hold on to that. I had done some painting by that time, of course, but this was something entirely different, I felt, because it was a harmony of colours. I couldn’t simply paint the ears of corn, and then suddenly it came to me that I wanted to make rugs like that.’

Thommesen transformed her experience of nature into a modern abstract visual idiom which she would go on to develop and refine throughout her life. The loom’s horizontal and vertical structure provided the framework for stringently symmetrical patterns softened with gently muted, warm colours drawn from the natural world. In her weavings she worked systematically, exploring colours and patterns that she repeated and varied over decades as if engaged in an extended conversation, or a piece of music.

From plant dyes to public commissions

Only recently, with the publication of art historian Philip Pihl’s 2023 monograph on Anna Thommesen, has an overview of her complete body of work been established, alongside efforts to inscribe it more firmly in Danish art history, where it has been almost absent so far. In her own lifetime, however, Thommesen was acclaimed and recognised. She produced a substantial and distinctive oeuvre of weavings for significant public spaces, museum collections, and private homes alike.

Anna Thommesen – Weavings offers fresh perspectives on her lifelong practice as a visual artist and presents an extensive selection of works from the 1940s to the 1990s. The exhibition features more than forty hand-woven pieces and, for the first time ever, brings together her four major, prestigious public commissions; works that secured her a prominent place in Danish art.

These include the monumental tapestries for two schools, Vesthimmerlands Gymnasium in Aars and Nørrelandsskolen in Holstebro, created the 1960s; the three large tapestries for the former Chamber of the Landsting in the Danish Parliament; and the works for the altar area in Roskilde Cathedral, both executed in the 1970s.

The exhibition also takes visitors behind the scenes of Thommesen’s process, presenting a rich selection of the meticulous pattern designs and painterly watercolour sketches that formed the starting point of her weavings. At the same time, it highlights Anna Thommesen’s decades-long work with dyeing yarns herself, presenting recipes and yarn samples.

Through photographs and other archival material, the exhibition also offers biographical insight into Anna Thommesen’s life and the artistic circles in which she moved, including her friendship with architect Finn Juhl and her association with the artists’ group Martsudstillingen (The March Exhibition) alongside her husband, Erik Thommesen.

Weaving in contemporary art

By choosing weaving as her medium, Anna Thommesen positioned herself between two disciplines: was she an artisan or an artist? She remained committed to a rigorous, hands-on craft approach, while also bringing the medium of weaving into modern Danish art with poignant force.

Anna Thommesen – Weavings also addresses the significant role textile media have taken on in contemporary art and the current interest in understanding the place of textiles in art history, with prominent examples including the solo exhibition on artist Anni Albers’s weavings at Tate Modern in 2018–19 and the North American touring exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, which concluded at MoMA in New York in September 2025.


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