MALMO.- The Artist is a unique collaboration between Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In a single exhibition the museum is showing works by many of the most well-known names in the history of art from 1500 to the present—from Rubens to Renoir and Picasso to Cindy Sherman—as well as Rembrandt, who is back in Malmö for the first time in fifty years. The Artist brings together works from different eras selected from the collections of all three art institutions, as well as a number of key pieces on loan from others.

The Artist is divided into five chapters: Entrepreneur, Genius and Avant Gardist, Norm-Breaker, Visionary, and Traveller. The role of the artist is anything but uniform, and the exhibition illuminates some of the myths that surround artists. It’s a long way from the courtly painter working on commission for a wealthy clientele to the bohemian who wants to be unencumbered by the values of polite society. Each chapter is anachronistic in that the exhibition team has striven to identify a number of artists who played similar roles at diverse points in history. The exhibition also aims to create space for new art historical insights and knowledge about how women artists used to be marginalized and about how non-western cultures have been looked upon.

In conjunction with the exhibition Moderna Museet Malmö is launching a substantial educational initiative in the form of an outreach project for the local schools with the highest incidence of childhood poverty that gives children and young people an opportunity to tell their own story of art. Since the spring of 2016 the museum has been offering guided tours in Arabic on the first Saturday of every month.

The exhibition includes an audio guide in which the exhibition team discusses the genesis of the exhibition in a conversation moderated by cultural journalist Ulrika Knutson.

The Artist was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm during
the spring of 2016.