YAYOI KUSAMA

17.9.2015 - 24.1.2016
http://en.louisiana.dk/

The Louisiana exhibition unfurls the whole of Kusama’s life’s work: from early watercolours and pastels to her ground-breaking paintings and sculptures from the 1960s, psychedelic films, performances, installations and political happenings in the 1960s and the early 1970s, as well as shedding new light on works from the 1980s, after the artist’s return to Tokyo. Also on show exhibition are several of Kusama’s recent installations, and a series of new paintnings by the 86-year-old Kusama, created especially for Louisiana’s exhibition. The exhibition is the first Kusama retrospective to take into account the artist’s interest in fashion and design but also includes several important works from her early period that have never before been exhibited.

LUCIAN FREUD

3.9.2015 - 29.11.2015
http://en.louisiana.dk/

In 2009, Louisiana held an extremely well-attended exhibition of paintings by the British artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Now, in the Louisiana on Paper series, focus will be on Freud as a graphic artist.

Freud was painter of human figures whose images cut bluntly to the bone in their treatment of men and women as fleshly creatures, and the leap into the graphics may seem strange, since it is painting that can release the physical look of the body most vividly. But Freud is similar in this regard to the painter Edvard Munch, who also was a masterful graphic artist: The flesh may perhaps disappear, but the body remains. And the face in particular gains strength when the color is eliminated and the drawing takes over. Freud’s graphic work is unmistakably Freudian – strong, confrontational, impossible to ignore, as though it was another person who had pushed you into a corner.

Emil Nolde

4th July 2014 - 19th October 2014 Add to calendar Book tickets
www.louisiana.dk

Emil Nolde (1867-1956) is one of the most important representatives of German Expressionism, but his close connection with Denmark – both biographically and geographically – also makes him a part of Danish art history. Nolde is known for the powerful, intensely colourful expression that typifies his subjects, whether they are depictions of flowers, figures or landscapes.
Over the years several thematic exhibitions have been mounted both in Denmark and abroad, but Louisiana’s summer exhibition is the first major retrospective presentation of the painter for several decades. The exhibition casts a present-day glance at Nolde’s extensive and composite oeuvre and seeks new perspectives on material well known to many people. It gathers up strands and addresses all the genres in which the artist worked. The 140 or so works in the exhibition, which cover the whole of the artist’s active period, comprise paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints as well as several works not previously exhibited

Asger Jorn & Jackson Pollock. Revolutionary Roads

15 November 2013 - 23 February 2014
http://www.louisiana.dk/

 The exhibition Asger Jorn & Jackson Pollock. Revolutionary Roads focuses on two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and on what was happening in expressionist painting in the years 1943-1963 – the period between the war years and the emergence of Pop Art. This is the first time one can experience a comparison of the two artists’ works. 

These two prominent artists, the American Jackson Pollock and the Dane Asger Jorn, never met. They were of the same generation, one born in Cody, Wyoming, USA in 1912 and the other in Vejrum, in Jutland, in 1914. Both were influenced by the same currents – the local tradition and the influence of the great European avant-gardists, especially Picasso. Both were fascinated by Surrealism’s liberation of the unconscious material in the human psyche, and both worked with automatic drawing, drip techniques, canvases on the floor and an experimental application of the paint. Both artists were intensely interested in myths: in Jorn’s case figures of Norse legend and imaginary beings formed the basis for the idea of a kind of fundamental images, of freer, more direct communication between art and the viewer. Pollock was preoccupied with the sand-paintings of the Native Americans and other folk art, and linked this ornamental tradition with the dynamics of ‘drip’ or ‘action’ painting. Each in his own way, the two artists revolutionized painting in the post-war years. Pollock represents the climax of modernism, while Jorn with his formal idiom also seeks both to subvert and liberate painting as communication.