Nordic noir @ British Museum, London - Works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson

Nordic noir: Works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson

British Museum, London

9 October 2025 – 22 March 2026

Mamma Andersson

The Fallow Deer, 2016

Handprinted colour woodcut on rice paper

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Fatima Moallim

Källa, 2021 

Marker pen, oil crayon and graphite

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Olafur Eliasson

Don't look to the horizon, 2024 

Watercolour and glacial ice

Courtesy of the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

The British Museum presents around 150 works from 100 different artists in an exhibition celebrating graphic works on paper from the Nordic region. 

Nordic noir: works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson is the culmination of a five-year programme dedicated to building the Museum's collection of post-war Nordic artwork. 

Jennifer Ramkalawon, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Nordic Graphic Art said: 'This project was a five-year voyage of discovery. These countries have so much creativity to offer with contemporary artists exploring themes of nature, the environment, identity and heritage. The artists in the show are well-known in their home countries, but this exhibition aims to showcase the incredible array of talent from the Nordic lands to a wider UK and international audience – many of them are on display for the first time.'  

John Savio

Suopan (Lasso), c.1928-1934

Woodcut

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Henrik Finne

Fiskere, 1942 

Colour woodcut

Reproduced by permission of the artist's estate 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Showcasing one of the best collections of Nordic art outside the region, the exhibition aims to provide a welcome and stimulating insight into the distinctive art originating there.  

Although Scandinavia is sometimes viewed by outsiders as a homogenous entity, the exhibition highlights individual characteristics and complexities within the various Nordic countries, as well as exploring universal and overarching themes. It also questions the definition of Nordic art and what it means to be a Nordic artist through work by artists who have immigrated to and emigrated from the region.

Edvard Munch

The Old Fisherman, 1897 

Woodcut on Japan paper

© The Trustees of the British Museum

One of the most well-known artists to emerge from Scandinavia is expressionist Edvard Munch. Two of Munch's woodcut prints are featured at the beginning of the exhibition. Following a chronological narrative, it explores how the graphic arts flourished and evolved after his death in 1944. Prints and drawings from 1945 to the present day highlight how the region's artists continue to develop Munch's creative legacy of emotional intensity and artistic inventiveness. 

Lea Ignatius

Soutaja, 1981 

Colour etching

Reproduced by permission of the artist's estate 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Per Kirkeby 

Untitled, 2016 

Monotype in green, yellow and black ink

Reproduced by permission of the artist's estate 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Vanessa Baird

My Mother, 2019 

Watercolour

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Key themes throughout the exhibition are nature and the vital urgency to preserve the environment of the fjords, mountains and forests unique to the region. The artworks on display also delve into the worlds of Norse myth, inner struggles with mental health, post-war angst and the threat of the Cold War, feminism and the rights of the Indigenous Sámi people. 

Yuichiro Sato 

In the Air III, 2019 

Graphite, mineral pigment, acrylic paint

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

John Kørner

Understanding the Impact of Architecture 12, 2020

Colour lithograph

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Vibeke Slyngstad

Shuafat II, 2023

Watercolour

Reproduced by permission of the artist 

© The Trustees of the British Museum

The landmark collecting project, supported by a substantial grant from charitable organisation AKO Foundation, resulted in the acquisition by the British Museum of almost 400 works by artists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. It has added to the many Nordic prints purchased by the Museum in the 1990s. 

As well as Edvard Munch and Mamma Andersson, featured artists include Olafur Eliasson, John Savio, Vanessa Baird, Yuichiro Sato, Fatima Moallim, John Kørner and many more. 

Xerxes Mazda, Director of Collections said: 'It has been almost 30 years since the British Museum devoted a show to Nordic graphic art. Thanks to the generosity of AKO Foundation, we have been able to build one of the best collections of Nordic art outside the region, investing in and exploring how artists such as Mamma Andersson have developed the legacy of an artist like Edvard Munch. Nordic noir and the collecting strategy behind it showcases the British Museum's commitment to acquiring works for the nation, preserving the work of both up-and-coming and established artists for future generations.'

 

To coincide with the exhibition, a beautifully illustrated catalogue, Nordic noir: works on paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson, written by Jennifer Ramkalawon, was published by the British Museum Press in October 2025. Paperback, £35, ISBN 9780714136509

BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON

www.britishmuseum.org

Rei Naito @ Peder Lund, Oslo - 'breath' Exhibition

Rei Naito: breath

Peder Lund, Oslo

November 22, 2025 – February 14, 2026

Peder Lund presents an exhibition with the eminent Japanese artist Rei Naito (b. 1961, Hiroshima). Renowned for her delicate installations, sculptures, and works on paper that explore the incomprehensible fact of life itself, Rei Naito invites visitors into an atmosphere of quiet reflection on breath, spirit, and our shared existence. At the heart of her practice lies the enduring question: "Is simply existing on this earth a blessing in itself?" 

To encounter a work by Rei Naito is to enter a space of heightened awareness — of one's own body, one's breath, and of life itself as a fleeting yet shared condition. Over the past forty years, Naito has devoted her practice to what she has described as "the incomprehensible fact that we are alive in this world." Her works do not impose meaning so much as they stage conditions in which meaning arises — ephemeral, delicate, and deeply intimate.

Central to Naito's art is the concept of breath. For Rei Naito, breath is at once invisible and palpable, a paradoxical force that affirms life precisely because it cannot be contained or possessed. In the sculptural installation tama/anima (please breathe life into me) (2025), a narrow gutter of water shimmers with subtle movement. The work unites two linguistic roots: tama, the Japanese word for spirit or soul, and anima, the Latin root for breath. The piece quietly insists that to live is to participate in this exchange of air and water, of spirit and body. It epitomizes her conviction that art, at its most essential, is a vessel for the life force that cannot be owned but only experienced.

Her commitment to this elemental aesthetic was seen in her 2023 exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, where tama/anima appeared in dialogue with color beginning. The series color beginning originated in 2021 as a pair of paper works exhibited at MtK Contemporary Art in Kyoto. In 2024, at the Tokyo National Museum, Rei Naito introduced the expanded title color beginning/breath with the addition of "breath." These exhibitions deepened a process that now culminates in Oslo, where paintings and sculptural works form a single, sustained inhalation and exhalation across space.

If tama/anima embodies the vital currents of water and spirit, Naito's works on paper register breath in another register. The series developed out of a daily practice of attuning to light and atmosphere. For Naito, each work is not an image but a lived exhalation, a veil of color that makes palpable the moment of its own making. Positioning herself at a point removed from form, Naito explores moments when mind, hands, fingers, paper, paint, water, and brush become one. Her painting media shift and go through cycles; Rei Naito employs brushes, spoons, paper, canvas, flannel, paint tubes, tissue, and even branches, awakening physical and mental instincts that transcend human will. Many of the works exhibited at Peder Lund were painted using branches; the final piece completed with a branch gathered in Oslo. This method liberates her and the countless lives dwelling in the unconscious, guiding her toward the essence of human nature.

During preparations for her recent exhibitions, Rei Naito began to perceive the white surfaces of her paintings as "matrix" spaces — living grounds where color reveals air and light within, generating phenomena akin to her spatial works. The presentation at Peder Lund extends this understanding: paintings and sculptural works intertwine, exploring the indivisibility of life and death. The works reveal a world in which everything — objects, people, animals, plants, air, light, the departed and the unborn — interweaves inseparably with our own breath.

Crucially, Rei Naito refuses to frame these drawings. To do so, she explains, would seal them off from the atmosphere of the world, contradicting their very essence. The works are intended to breathe with the space in which they are shown, their edges unprotected, their surfaces vulnerable. Like breaths, they must remain porous, inseparable from the air around them. Installed unframed, the drawings ask the viewer to approach gently, to encounter them not as objects but as presences — fragile, momentary, and inseparable from the act of perception itself.

The unframed condition also signals Naito's insistence on site specificity. She creates works only after visiting a space, allowing the encounter with its light, scale, and atmosphere to shape the form of what she produces. Her art is never autonomous but always relational, responsive to place. This principle is most famously evident in Matrix (2010) at the Teshima Art Museum, designed with Ryue Nishizawa, where water droplets form and disperse endlessly across a concrete floor, inextricable from the architecture and its natural surroundings. But the same principle governs her paper works: each is conceived as a beginning rather than a closed composition, a color-breath that expands into the environment of its display.

Naito's commitment to fragility and specificity has been affirmed by a series of major institutional exhibitions. At the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, she realised Tout animal est dans le monde comme de l'eau à l'intérieur de l'eau (2009–10), a pivotal, site-specific project that marked a turning point in her practice; the work has since been revisited from the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama (2022–23). More recently, the Tokyo National Museum presented come and live – go and live (June–September 2024), an exhibition conceived in direct dialogue with the museum's architecture and holdings, extending her site-responsive ethos across multiple galleries. At the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, she created a suite of acrylic works that responded directly to the changing light of the museum's modernist galleries.

Other works in the present exhibition extend these concerns materially. The balloon sculpture Two Lives (2025) contains air as its medium — literal breath held in nylon forms, suspended by thread, subject to the slightest shift in atmosphere. The wool cluster color beginning (2025) suggests both cellular growth and cosmic formation, inviting the viewer to contemplate life at scales both intimate and infinite. Together, these works reinforce Naito's conviction that existence is contingent, provisional, and always shared.

Rei Naito first came to international attention with her participation in the 1997 Venice Biennale, where her installation One Place on Earth permitted a single visitor at a time to enter a fragile, translucent chamber. That radical gesture defined her subsequent practice: art as encounter, both profoundly personal and inseparable from the larger shared condition of being. Later projects have expanded this vocabulary to architectural scale, but always with the same insistence on fragility, intimacy, and breath.

In a contemporary art landscape often dominated by spectacle, Naito's works stand as quiet resistances. They ask us to attend to what is smallest, most fleeting, and most vital. In doing so, she belongs to a lineage of artists — from Eva Hesse and Agnes Martin to James Turrell — who reveal the immaterial through subtle means. Yet Naito's contribution is distinct: her art insists not only on perception but on coexistence. To breathe with her works is to recognize the breath we share with others, with animals, with the environment itself.

Rei Naito's art is neither doctrinal nor programmatic. Though she draws on the resonances of spiritual traditions, she remains outside any one system of belief. What she offers instead is art as lived metaphysics: an opportunity to experience the fact of existence, not through abstraction but through the simplest of means — water, light, color, air, and above all, breath. Her works are not objects to be possessed but conditions to be entered into. They remind us, gently but with insistence, that to be alive is to be fragile, connected, and sustained by breath.

Rei Naito has been honored with solo exhibitions at various esteemed institutions, including The National Museum of Art, Osaka (1995); Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt am Main (1997); The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Kanagawa (2009); Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Tokyo (2014); The Japan Cultural Institute in Paris (2017); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2017); Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki (2018); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa; and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Munich (2023).

Permanent installations include Being given (Kinza, Art House Project, Naoshima, Kagawa, 2001) and Matrix (Teshima Art Museum, Teshima, Kagawa, 2010). Awards received include Promising Artists and Scholars of Contemporary Japanese Arts by Japan Arts Foundation (1994); 1st Asahi Beer Arts Awards by Asahi Beer Arts Foundation (2003); 60th Mainichi Art Prize (2018); and 69th Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts (2019).

This is the first solo exhibition of Rei Naito's work in Scandinavia.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

Marguerite Humeau @ ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj - "Torches" Exhibition

Marguerite Humeau: Torches

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj

Through 19 October 2025

Marguerite Humeau, 2024 

Photography by Eoin Greally 

Image courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau 

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025 

© Marguerite Humeau 

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau 

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025 

© Marguerite Humeau 

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

In the immersive exhibition Torches, French artist Marguerite Humeau creates a richly affective opera that spans across time and space, asking questions about our shared origins and alternative futures. Sound and light bring Humeau’s sculptures and installations to life, weaving a complex and evocative narrative. Her works incorporate many unconventional materials, including beeswax, wasp venom, yeast and cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae.

In the exhibition Torches, the internationally acclaimed French artist MARGUERITE HUMEAU (b. 1986) invites us to rethink our past, present and future here on Earth – and guides us through the darkness with her art. Conceived as an opera, the exhibition presents the artworks in an array of interlinked acts, using sound and light as mainstays of the other-worldly narratives that have won Marguerite Humeau international acclaim. She is also known for incorporating unusual materials in her art, with examples including hand-blown glass, waxed felt, laser-cut steel, silk, and even yeast. The exhibition at ARKEN also presents a work featuring an ecosystem of cyanobacteria that will continue to multiply during the exhibition run. 

Curator Sarah Fredholm explains the exhibition title, Torches, by pointing out that ‘the works, embodying characters, are like torches in the dark. They point towards new connections between all living things across time and place and show us the way ahead,’ she says and continues: 

‘Even though the point of departure of Marguerite Humeau’s work is our crisis-stricken planet, there is still hope to be found. Her art shows us that we can still find fresh starts and new beginnings; all we need to do is to imagine other ways of existing, ways that are more closely attuned to the rich variety of the rest of life on Earth.’

Marguerite Humeau 

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025 

© Marguerite Humeau 

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau 

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025 

© Marguerite Humeau 

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau 

‘Torches’ at ARKEN Museum, 2025 

© Marguerite Humeau 

Photography by Mathilde Agius

Courtesy of the artist

Marguerite Humeau’s works ask thought-provoking questions: What if elephants had become the dominant species on Earth? What would the world look like if we co-operated like ants or bees? Or if life could only be sustained high up in the atmosphere? Torches shows us new perspectives to marvel at and possibly learn from. 

Says curator Sarah Fredholm: ‘With her art, Marguerite Humeau offers up alternative narratives about possible ways of co-existing here on Earth; ways where humankind does not take centre stage and where the boundaries between lifeforms, time and place are fluid and open to renegotiation.’   

For the first time ever, Torches brings together all-new and earlier works by Marguerite Humeau. It is also the artist’s first solo show in Scandinavia. Furthermore, Torches constitutes the third and final part of ARKEN’s exhibition series NATURE FUTURE, in which prominent figures on the international art scene focus on humanity’s relationship with art, nature and technology. The previous instalments in the series were Refik Anadol’s Nature Dreams (2023) and Julian Charrière’s Solarstalgia (2024–25).

Marguerite Humeau was born in 1986 in Cholet, France, and lives and works in London. She holds an MA (2011) from The Royal College of Art, London. Her past exhibitions include solo shows at ICA Miami (2024), Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2021), Kunstverein Hamburg (2019), Museion, Bolzano (2019), New Museum, New York (2018), Tate Britain, London (2017), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). 

The exhibition Torches is presented in co-operation with the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), where it will subsequently be shown. 

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art

Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj

www.arken.dk

Marguerite Humeau: Torches

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, 22 May - 19 October 2025