Past exhibitions

From the sensual to the cool, the fluid to the solid. Classics and brand new works come together in the West Wing, challenging our senses and showcasing the full range of the Louisiana Collection in this 60th anniversary season.

With his iconic interpretations of American society in the past five decades, Ed Ruscha (born 1937) stands out as one of the most prominent figures of 20th century American art. Ed Ruscha is closely associated with cool and elegant representations of stylized gas stations, Hollywood logos and archetypal landscapes. His work seems to distil the...

Three of the great names of contemporary photography – Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman and Thomas Struth – form part of a fine selection of works from the Louisiana Collection, on view in the far end of the South Wing during april.

As part of the wild art scene in New York in the early 1980s, George Condo was close to painters such as Basquiat and Keith Haring and worked at Warhol's Factory applying diamond dust to silkscreen. At the same time, he found his way to his own artistic expression, which he describes as "artificial realism". Condo (born in 1957) mixes input from...

A true master of modern portraiture, Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra’s large photographs and videos are brilliant studies of identity, vulnerability and dignity. She manages to capture people so that they are present to an astonishing degree, right there in that very moment. Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) is one of the most prominent and internationally...

Danish Tal R is one of the most striking artists of his generation with a strong and growing international reputation. Since the 1990s he has exhibited all around the world, particularly in Europe, and his art is represented in many major collections. During the past decade Louisiana has established a distinctive collection of works – especially...

For the first time in Scandinavia Louisiana presented a major solo exhibition of the South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955), who is known all over the world for his drawings, films, sculp­tures, performances and opera and theatre productions.

The American artist Barnett Newman (1905-1970) was one of the preeminent figures the art scene in New York in the 1950s. Here he worked in radical and revolutionary ways with painting as well as other media. Louisiana on Paper’ showed a selection of 12 drawings and 26 of his prints.

With the series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar American artist Taryn Simon (b. 1975) portrays American society through photographs of places that are normally inaccessible to the general public.

Cool, colorful, provocative, wildly experimental and visionary - Louisiana’s exhibition on Poul Gernes was a powerful humorous, beautiful and ambiguous story about one of the truly great Danish artists of the post-war generation. Poul Gernes (1925-1996) is widely known for his large public decorations such as the Palads Cinema in Copenhagen and...

A cornucopia of international contemporary and classic works of art that Louisiana has acquired over the past three years – almost one hundred works within painting, photography, sculpture and installation.

With around 100 works and more than 40 artists, this exhibition was the first major presentation of Op Art and Kinetic Art in Scandinavia for more than 50 years, opening the door to a visual experimental laboratory with the whole range of media and techniques.

David Altmejd has created one of the most attention-grabbing works of the last few years in the field of sculpture and installation. The Flux and the Puddle is a fascinating and frightening work about the body and its place in the world.

Anselm Kiefer , Juan Munoz , Thomas Demand , Cindy Sherman , Per Kirkeby , Matthew Day Jackson , Rineke Dijkstra and more. This presentation of works from the Louisiana collection highlights a selection of classics and contemporary favorites featuring among other mediums: photography, painting and sculpture. Louisiana’s collection of modern and...

This major exhibition at Louisiana focuses on architecture , art and culture on the African continent. By pinpointing a number of judiciously selected examples from a cultural here and now , the exhibition sheds light on the diversity and complexity of the part of Africa south of the Sahara Desert . Through a number of projects spread over the...

Louisiana has a deep-rooted relationship with painting as such. This is evident in the museum’s collection as well as in the exhibition program. With the exhibition of paintings by Peter Doig (born 1959 in Edinburgh), a long-cherished wish will be fulfilled.

Once again it is time for Hockney at Louisiana, this time in the Louisiana on Paper series with the artist’s striking drawings of the landscape of Yorkshire, where he was born. They are completely classical in style, sometimes drawn in the open air, other times from the driver’s seat of a car parked by the corner of a fence.

By means of simple and subtle modifications of older paintings , the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann sets the images free – in the sense of free of history, of their sublimity, and free of their originating social context, and thereby invite us to meet and think the artworks anew . Feldmann’s art can in fact be described as political, but at the...

Louisiana has received eight unique works by Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky, Pollock, Dubuffet, Kiefer and Kelly from Celia Ascher, former director of The Riklis-McCrory Collection in New York, and one of Louisiana's faithful friends and generous supporters since 1977.

A renewed opportunity to see Israeli artist Yael Bartana's three fascinating, provocative and visually stunning films. The Louisiana Museum was a co-producer on the film, subsequently acquiring the complete trilogy for the Collection. With these three films, originally shown in Louisiana in the Spring of 2012 and now part of the Collection, Yael...

Olafur Eliasson's take on Louisiana is radical, fascinating and unique. The central work in the first solo exhibition at the museum by the Danish-Icelandic artist is a huge, sitespecific project that reverses the relation between nature and art.

The major exhibition of summer 2014 at Louisiana was Emil Nolde. Nolde (1867-1956) is a classic – whether for his almost spontaneously combustible watercolors of poppies and other colorful natural phenomena or his distinctive expressionist love of the primitive, the simple.

Since the 1960s attempts have been made to topple painting from its perch, resuscitate it and - not least - analyse it thoroughly, with a view to reinstating it in new, meaningful modes of expression. This presentation offered a number of case stories and points of view meant to elucidate painting all the way up to works created this very year...

The exhibition showed, in a rare cross-section spanning of Joseph Beuys' entire career from the 1940s to the 1980s, how his entire work is based on small formats. Beuys made sketches and experiments with materials, and his visual diaries mix observations and classifications in the best scientific sense.

In a study room at the entrance to the South Wing you will find a selection of fine art works on paper, which was donated to Louisiana by Celia Ascher, one of the museum's most loyal supporters over the years. This is an exquisite collection of drawings and gouaches, especially from the early European and Russian Constructivism.

Snow and ice, darkness and northern lights, beauty, silence, strife and storm. Louisiana heads straight north to a region of magnetic lure. In themes ranging from the sublime to conquest and myth, this spectacular Arctic quest takes you through real-life dramas, harsh conditions and impossible dreams – a journey into the imagination, art, science...

Tara Donovan uses a variety of everyday materials such as drinking straws, nails and buttons as a basis for her works. She chooses pieces of one material that she assembles, glues and stacks one above the other, or otherwise repeats or accumulates into a form that offers entirely new and unexpected experiences.

Louisiana proudly presents this first ever museum show of this exceptional collection of fine drawings by a very young Andy Warhol from the 1950s. At full these early, often commercial works demonstrate what an outstanding draughtsman Warhol was.

The self-portrait is a classic, well-tried but also intense and sometimes raw genre taking many different expressions all through art history. The exhibition shows major works from the twentieth century till the present and in all media. Comprising important works by a.o Picasso, Bonnard, Dalí, Kahlo, Mapplethorpe, Warhol and Basquiat.

Five Car Stud is rebellious, provocative and physically insistent. Its relevance potent it reaches back to America’s historical roots and reflects current violence committed to the individual by the mob, be it for political, ethnic, religious or sexual reasons.

Works by eight of the most prominent women avant-garde artists of the inter-war years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Claude Cahun, Sonia Delaunay, Germaine Dulac, Florence Henri, Hannah Höch, Katarzyna Kobro and Dora Maar reveal the story of a network of striking artists who were pioneers and driving forces in the avant-garde movement.

Gursky is a visual artist before he is a photographer. Photography and the incredible programs of the computer are the means of creating images that are about something, images that work.

By using traditional Chinese materials and craftsmanship as well as modern industrial technology, Ai Weiwei’s works not only reflect and thematize the main currents of the twentieth century – its dreams and monuments; at the same time they attempt, like all living art, to leave a mark in the eternally flowing present.