Michelangelo Imperfect @ National Gallery of Denmark, SMK, Copenhagen

Michelangelo Imperfect

National Gallery of Denmark, SMK, Copenhagen

Through 31 August, 2025

Facsimile after Michelangelo Buonarroti

Active Life (Leah). Original 1542–44,

facsimile 2024–25

The Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark. Photo: SMK

Facsimile after Michelangelo Buonarroti 

Genius of Victory Original c. 1519-26, 

facsimile 2024-25

The Royal Cast Collection, SMK –

National Gallery of Denmark. Photo: SMK

Plaster cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti

Bacchus. Original c. 1496-97, cast c. 1874-79

The Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark. Photo: SMK

He painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and his sculptures are known worldwide. SMK presents the most comprehensive display of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s sculptural work seen in 150 years.

If one were to point to a single artist who has contributed fundamentally to the modern perception of art as self-expression in Western culture, it would be the Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). His iconic statue David shows us why.

Viewed from the left, the almost five-metre-tall figure is a classically idealised, alert young man ready for battle – but when seen from the other side he changes expression, revealing doubt and hesitation. Michelangelo insisted on reflecting the often conflicted and contradictory inner lives of his figures. He was not the first to do so, but he did it with such consistency that it changed the course of art.

A bronze David and thirty-nine other sculptures reproduced after Michelangelo can be seen at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) in Copenhagen in the exhibition Michelangelo Imperfect. Not since the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth in Florence in 1875 has so comprehensive a selection of the artist’s sculptural production been gathered in one place.

Plaster cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti 

Brutus. Original 1540 or 1548, cast 1897 

The Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark. Photo: SMK

Plaster cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti

Day (Giorno). Original c. 1525-26, cast 1897

The Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark Photo: SMK

Plaster cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti 

Head of David. Original 1501-1504, cast 1890

The Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark. Photo: SMK

Michelangelo’s focus was almost exclusively on the human body, especially the male form, in which he found endless scope for expressing thoughts, emotions and tensions. He invariably strove for greatness, reaching for the impossible. Already in his lifetime, he was described as ‘il divino’ – the divine. But his art also revolves around the imperfect, the unfinished and the fragile; around being in a state of becoming, anxious, wavering and hesitating. This is apparent in his biblical, mythological and allegorical subjects alike.

‘This is the impossible exhibition: You would never be able to gather Michelangelo’s original sculptures in one place. But with SMK’s collection of historical reproductions in plaster and newly produced facsimiles of the highest quality, we are able to present a perhaps imperfect, yet strikingly complete, overall account of a body of work that changed art forever and remains remarkably poignant today,’ says the exhibition’s curator, Matthias Wivel.

The basis for SMK’s exhibition is its exquisite collection of historical casts after Michelangelo sculptures in the Royal Cast Collection. Most of these were commissioned and cast in 1895–98 for the then-new National Gallery of Denmark (today SMK). Some were added in the twentieth- and early twenty-first century. The collection encompasses the majority of Michelangelo’s most famous sculptures.

Cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti

Head of David. Original c. 1501-04, cast 1890

Photo from the Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark

Cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti

The Dying Prisoner. Original c. 1513-14, cast c. 1852–70

Photo from the Royal Cast Collection, SMK – 

National Gallery of Denmark

In order to get as close as possible to a complete presentation of the Renaissance master’s sculptures, SMK complements these historical plaster casts with newly commissioned and -produced 3D-modelled and cast sculptures – so-called facsimiles – produced in Madrid by Factum Foundation, world leaders in the production of facsimiles, reconstructions and rematerialisations of artworks.

This enables SMK to bring together under one roof reproductions of masterpieces that in the original are located in many different places and with only a few exceptions are never moved, either because they are too fragile to travel, too difficult to move, or, quite simply, too culturally significant. The exhibition also includes original sculptural models (maquettes), drawings, and letters from Michelangelo’s own hand.

‘This [is] a unique opportunity to experience Michelangelo’s sculptural art as a whole. At the same time, it offers a chance to reflect on the role played by reproduction and copying in art and in our understanding of art. Reproductions have always been part of the way we create and perceive art, but have been somewhat neglected in a museum context in recent times. We see great potential here,’ says the exhibition’s curator, Matthias Wivel.

In connection with the exhibition, SMK is publishing a comprehensive and richly illustrated catalogue that presents new research and unfolds themes from the exhibition – including an exploration of the relationship between original and copy, as well as a challenge to the distinction between the finished and the unfinished, the perfect and the imperfect.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

SMK - STATENS MUSEUM FOR KUNST

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 Copenhagen

www.smk.dk

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Yvette Brackman Installation @ SMK, Copenhagen - National Gallery of Denmark - "Salon des Refusés" Exhibition

Yvette Brackman: Salon des Refusés

SMK, Copenhagen

11 April – 8 September 2024

Ville Jais-Nielsen 

Figure Composition, 1949

Courtesy of the SMK

Juliette Meyer Willumsen 

Inkwell with Four Female Figures, 1896

Courtesy of the SMK

Since 2000, American-born Yvette Brackman (b. 1967, New York City) has worked as an artist in Denmark. Her mother and father came to the United States as Jewish dissidents from the Soviet Union. And her own family’s transnational history is often the subject of her art, processed and conveyed through sculpture, performance, video and text.

In the new installation Salon des Refusés, which is part of Yvette Brackman’s postdoctoral research project at SMK, she has taken her own history as the starting point for unearthing new stories in the museum’s vast collection encompassing 700 years of visual art. Stories about escape, women’s art history, belonging, transnational artistic culture and cultural assimilation.

‘In this installation I reflect on my relationship with Danish art history and look for an artistic lineage. The SMK collection has a strong national focus, and the history of Jewish artists in Denmark is not represented as such. In my work, I have looked for gaps in the collection, which I have tried to fill by unfolding new stories and by adding relevant works,’ explains Yvette Brackman.

The Salon of the Refused

Yvette Brackman’s installation comprises a total of 27 works and is named after the French ‘Salon des Refusés’ of 1863: an exhibition for those artists who had been refused by the juried official Salon. She has selected works ranging from the years 1100 to 1949, all of which somehow represent Jewish history – or the lack thereof – in the SMK collection. Four of the artists featured in the installation are Juliette Meyer Willumsen (1863-1949), Ville Jais-Nielsen (1886-1949), Marie Henriques (1866-1944) and Chana Orloff (1888-1968). For Yvette Brackman, these four historical female artists each personify a specific destiny: the defeated, the refugee, the assimilated and the rebel.

Yvette Brackman’s installation of works from the collection has been underway since 2020. With the conflict between Hamas and Israel, a number of the exhibition's themes have taken on new topicality. Brackman’s project is rooted in historical events and circumstances, but the current situation illustrates, on several levels, how history and the present are always connected.

YVETTE BRACKMAN

Yvette Brackman (b. 1967) holds an MA in art history, an MA in fine art and a certificate in gender studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was born in New York City, has lived in Denmark since 1999 and became a Danish citizen in 2017. Since 2020, she has been a Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow at SMK, working with practice-based research.

Yvette Brackman has presented solo and group shows in Denmark and internationally at venues such as O – Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Nikolaj Kunsthal, the Liverpool Biennial and Freies Museum. She was professor and head of the School for Walls and Space at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has been a visiting professor at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art.

In 2016, SMK acquired a collection of her works entitled AGIT MEM, a series which draws on references to the Russian historical avant-garde and her family’s history as immigrants. In 2022, she was awarded the Danish Arts Foundation’s lifelong grant.

SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst

National Gallery of Denmark

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 Copenhagen

www.smk.dk

Jeppe Hein @ SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen - Under the Surface

Jeppe Hein: Under the Surface 

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

1 April – 22 October 2023

Jeppe Hein painting his breath onto a wall 

Photo by Hendrik Hähner / Studio Jeppe Hein

Courtesy: Jeppe Hein

Jeppe Hein

Breathe with Me at Moderna Museet, 2022 

Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: Åsa Lundén

Jeppe Hein

Breathe with Me at Moderna Museet, 2022 

Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: Åsa Lundén

How are you today? How do you feel about the world around you? Can you let go of your thoughts and just be in the moment?

SMK Thy launches its new season presenting an exhibition created by the internationally renowned artist Jeppe Hein (b. 1974) who encourages the museum’s visitors to pause, open their minds, take a deep breath and notice how they feel.

Mingling humour and serious reflection, he invites you to enter a world with plenty of room for play, dialogue, creativity and contemplation. Here, visitors have the opportunity to put their personal stamp on the exhibition’s four interactive works, all of which rely on the guests’ participation to fully unfold.

“This is an invitation to activate your senses, to be inspired, to share your perspective, to open up your heart, to do something you are maybe not used to do, to step out of your comfort zone and to find out something about yourself that you were not aware of. What is under your surface? The answer is within you!” says Jeppe Hein.

Jeppe Hein

Today I feel like … Right Here Right Now, 2022 

Courtesy KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: WebStyleStory

Jeppe Hein

Today I feel like … Right Here Right Now, 2022 

Courtesy KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, 

and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 

Photo: WebStyleStory

On display in ‘Pakhuset’ at Doverodde Købmandsgård, the participatory works include Breathe with Me, which has been shown all over the world in places such as New York, Beijing and Stockholm.

Here, Jeppe Hein asks the guests to take a brush, dip it in blue paint and paint vertical brushstrokes on the wall in time with their exhale. During the exhibition period, a growing number of lines will appear, reflecting how we are all connected through our breathing and how we breathe the same air, regardless of where in the world we live.

In Today I feel like… visitors can pick up a piece of chalk from a local limestone quarry and use it to draw their current mood in one of the many circles marked out on the walls.

The museum also presents an all-new work created specifically for the exhibition in Thy. Here, Jeppe Hein collaborates with the photographer and local Thy resident Fredrik Clement, who has photographed the west coast of Thy with its crashing waves, surfers and sand. Under the Surface features five of these photographs, displayed on a grand scale. Using brush and paint, Jeppe Hein has added new details and layers to the scenes, and visitors are invited to do the same on smaller posters.

Jeppe Hein, 2022. 

Photo: Jan Strempel Photography

JEPPE HEIN (b. 1974) is a graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. He is particularly known for his interactive works, where he makes use of surprising and captivating elements that place the audience at the centre of events and focus on their perception of the surrounding space.

Jeppe Hein has exhibited all over the world, including at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Rockefeller Center, New York City, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Permanent installations by Jeppe Hein can be found at ARKEN, Ishøj, La Guardia Airport, New York, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, among others.

SMK - STATENS MUSEUM FOR KUNST

NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

Sølvgade 48-50 - 1307 Copenhagen

www.smk.dk

Haegue Yang @ SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen - Double Soul

Haegue Yang: Double Soul

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

Through 24 July 2022

Haegue Yang

Photograph by Cheongjin Keem

SMK (The National Gallery of Denmark) presents the first-ever solo presentation in Denmark of the internationally acclaimed South Korean artist Haegue Yang. Her distinctive and pluralistic worlds, expressed in works that engage all the senses, often engage with notions of movement and trajectories. The exhibition Haegue Yang: Double Soul presents a range of Yang’s original and multi-faceted works, including a sixteen-metre high suspended kinetic piece made of blinds, creature-like sculptures covered in bells, sound and text pieces, drying racks embellished with electric light bulbs and much more.

An extensive selection of works from 1994 to 2020 are on view in this show  alongside new pieces commissioned by SMK, such as a sculpture duo, Sonic Intermediates – Double Soul, inspired by the work and life of two pioneering artists in the SMK collection, Pia Arke (1958–2007) and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984), who, each in their own way, resonate with Yang’s artistic explorations and subjective mapping of modernities.

Preoccupied with countering reductive categorisations, Yang focuses on the entangled relations between folklore and contemporary culture, industrial manufacturing and craft, the factual and the imaginary, the quotidian and the exceptional as well as vulnerability and confidence among other seemingly oppositional and disparate ideas.

SMK - NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 Copenhagen K

www.smk.dk

Tacita Dean - Print Projects @ SMK, Copenhagen - National Gallery of Denmark

Tacita Dean - Print Projects

National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

17 January - 18 May 2014

The life and death of a budgerigar. A Communist palace on the brink of being torn down. And the brown hessian-clad walls in the rooms housing Joseph Beuys’ installation in Darmstadt prior to their controversial renovation. “I am trying to trap something before it goes,” says the internationally acclaimed British artist Tacita Dean. Now, the Royal Collection of Graphic Art at Statens Museum for Kunst launches a new exhibition series by showing, for the first time ever, a full presentation of Tacita Dean’s graphic oeuvre.

Apart from the basic facts of time and place, Tacita Dean (b. 1965) actually has very little in common with the generation of Young British Artists with which she is often associated. Whereas artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst took the international art scene and media by storm in the 1990s, evincing no small flair for the sensational, Tacita Dean has quietly worked to the beat of her own drum, evincing a very different and far more subtle approach to art. And even though she has continuously explored new territories in her art, her works are always characterised by a strong sense of cohesion; a testament to an artist who found, right from the outset and with no hesitation, a mode of expression and subject matter that continues to engage and challenge.

Graphic art

Tacita Dean is first and foremost associated with her extensive production of 16mm films. Concurrently with her film work she has worked with a wide range of media, and in photogravure she found the potential for creating the same sense of depth that infuses the images of film. She realised and developed this potential in co-operation with the Danish specialist printer Niels Borch Jensen, who has handled her print work ever since they created her very first prints together. The exhibition in the Royal Collection of Graphic Art is the first ever to focus exclusively on Tacita Dean’s graphic art. Featuring more than 90 works, it shows the majority of her entire graphic oeuvre from 2001 to the present day.

Disappearing stories

The tactile, veiled qualities of photogravure are a particular favourite of Tacita Dean’s as she explores a recurring motif in her art: the relationship between memory and time, fiction and reality, unfolding her theme in a serial manner in storyboards that are almost filmic. Some of the motifs featured in the photogravures are still images from her films, while others come from old postcards, advertisements, and amateur photographs found in flea markets. Tacita Dean uses these images to construct narratives about major and minor historical or present-day events and actions. All of these more or less concrete stories are carried by the same ceaseless fascination with things that have disappeared or are about to disappear. In terms of narrative technique Tacita Dean takes an oblique approach. The narrative is almost never allowed to form a coherent story in the classical sense. The images are torn out of the grasp of narrative, transforming the absence of content into a strong visual presence.

CV – Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000. She has studied art at e.g. Slade School of Fine Art in London and exhibited her work at numerous museums, including Tate Britain, London (2001), ARC Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2003), Schaulager, Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), mumok: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Wien (2011), Tate Modern, London (2011), New Museum, New York (2012), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013). She has also taken part in the Venice Biennial (2003 and 2005) and Documenta 13 (2012). She has received numerous awards, e.g. the Hugo Boss Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006), and the Kurt Schwitters Award (2009). Throughout her career she has written about her art.

Accompanied by book

To coincide with the exhibition the SMK publishes the catalogue Tacita Dean – Print Projects. Article by Chief Curator Vibeke Vibolt Knudsen. Foreword by the former Director of the SMK Karsten Ohrt. 48 pages, lavishly illustrated. In Danish and English. ISBN: 978-87-92023-49-0

National Gallery of Denmark

Statens Museum for Kunst - SMK

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 København

www.smk.dk

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Human Comedy, SMK - National Gallery of Denmark

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Human Comedy 

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhague 
17 Septembre 2011 - 19 February 2012

A cripple descended from aristocratic stock who became the controversial chronicler of modern-day Paris. The story of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec can very easily simply become the oft-told tale of this quirky artist who, for better or worse, became as one with his own art and circle of motifs. A major exhibition at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) moves out of the shadow of the mythology surrounding the artist. Featuring more than 130 works, the exhibition presents a sharply focused image of an artist whose depictions of the Parisian entertainment scene dissected and commented on modern existence by means of striking and groundbreaking effects. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) 

Toulouse-Lautrec as Pierrot, Photograph, 1894

Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, France

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Urban Scene - Paris

More than any other artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) stands as the enfant terrible of French late 19th century art. Over a brief but intense period of slightly more than 15 years the artist infiltrated the city’s entertainment scenes, interpreting virtue and vice across boundaries of class and social distinction without compromise. The city, which was described in Lautrec’s own day as a stage, became the starting point of his art. And the entertainment industry was the microcosm he used to record how the players on the urban scene staged themselves and their desires, regardless of gender and class.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s circle of motifs focuses on theatres, circuses, brothels, cafés, and dance halls, particularly in Montmartre. Here he created a repertoire of figures that comprised dancers, singers, actors, prostitutes, and their audiences and clients. Exercising his keen eye for tragic comedy this gallery of characters became an obvious source of subject matter in his work on decoding urban existence. The exhibition offers a veritable parade of such portrayals, demonstrating how Lautrec used caricature as a way of making shrewd observations of the social games being played; games which were set against the backdrop of a growing consumer culture and often centred on sexuality and desires. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

La Clownesse, seated, Mademoiselle Cha-U-Kao (From the album Elles)

1896

Lithograph, 525 x 403 mm

Image courtesy of the SMK

Toulouse-Lautrec: A pioneer

Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic identity and anti-bourgeois attitude prompted him to transgress the boundaries between popular and highbrow culture, prefiguring aspects of 20th century avant-garde art. Parallel to his purely artistic work he also created illustrations and advertisements marketing a range of products and experiences. 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)  

La Chaîne Simpson - The Simpson Chain / Advertisement 

Designmuseum Danmark, The Prints and Drawings Collection 

Photo: Pernille Klemp 

1896

Poster, lithograph, 876 x 1247 mm

The exhibition focuses attention on Lautrec’s graphic works and on selected drawings. It shows how he, with his keenly honed sense for the commercial market and mass communication, found his own radical and innovative idiom, particularly within the graphic medium – which includes his groundbreaking posters. In his graphic experiments he employed simplification, stylisation, and exaggeration to achieve a hitherto unseen form and effect that had a strong impact on the public conscience – an idiom which means that his artistic takes on the human condition remain as fresh and mischievous today as when they were created.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901)

Cover for the album Yvette Guilbert

1894

Lithograph, 407 x 388 mm
Image courtesy of the SMK

At the exhibition: Themes, guide, app and film Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre

The exhibition differs from conventional retrospectives by opting out of the typical mode of chronological presentation. Rather, the many works are arranged by themes, focusing on the various scenes and players featured in Lautrec’s universe. The exhibition is accompanied by an informative guide, and visitors can also – before, during, and after their visit – access other materials such as apps for their smartphones and iPods. The latter can be borrowed from the ticket desk. Also, the film Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre is shown every day in the exhibition and in the Gallery’s cinema. 

Toulouse-Lautrec. The Human Comedy: Exhibition Catalogue 

On the occasion of this exhibition The National Gallery of Denmark also publishes with Prestel the catalogue Toulouse-Lautrec. The Human Comedy. Main article by Birgitte Anderberg and Vibeke Vibolt Knudsen, preface by Karsten Ohrt. 176 p, 24x30, richly illustrated. Available in Danish, and German.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 

Die menschliche Komödie 

Prestel, 2011 

SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst 
Solvgade 48-50
DK-1307 Kopenhagen

Website: www.smk.dk

The exhibitions at the Royal Collection of Graphic Art are sponsored by Oak Foundation Denmark