The Best Shows in Copenhagen Right Now

Kaari Upson | Louisiana Museum of Modern Art | 27 May –26 October

‘Dollhouse – A Retrospective’ is the first major overview of Kaari Upson’s career since her death from cancer in 2021. It’s a profoundly personal rendition of Americana, most vividly depicted through an enlarged version of her childhood doll’s house, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE (2017–19). Its interior evokes the suburban tract homes of Upson’s youth in San Bernardino, California.

One of the exhibition’s recurring figures is Larry, a fictional alter ego inspired by a neighbour of Upson’s parents, whose depraved desires surface in The Grotto (2008), a fibreglass reconstruction of the Playboy Mansion grotto, where Upson appears in videos clad in prosthetic genitalia and breasts. Upson’s mother, Karin, also permeates her practice, most poignantly in the artist’s final drawing series, ‘Foot Face’ (2020–21), which depicts Karin’s facial features dissolving into the shape of a foot – a melancholic and surreal examination of a mother–daughter dynamic, strained by their parallel terminal illnesses.

Reba Maybury | O–Overgaden | 30 August – 26 October

Much of the art produced by self-styled ‘political dominatrix’ Reba Maybury is made with or by consenting submissives. By outsourcing acts of art-making, the British artist sheds light on how creativity, like desire, can be structured by domination and subjugation. In the past, Maybury has had men draw themselves as worms (The Goddess and the Worm, 2015), put on another submissive’s clothing (Used Men, 2021) and roll on the floor to have their bodily traces illuminated by UV light (Faster than an Erection, 2021). 

For her exhibition at O–Overgaden, ‘Private Life’, Maybury had her submissives use paint-by-numbers kits to recreate Edgar Degas’s famous scenes of sex workers washing. These impressionist pictures of women engaged in private acts of bathing – stepping into the tub or reaching for the soap – are soaked in voyeurism. Maybury turns the disquieting dynamic between Degas and his models on its head, drawing a poignant link between the capitalist economy of the art market and the sex trade.

‘Shape of a Minute’ | V1 Gallery / Eighteen | 23 August – 27 September

At Eighteen gallery in Kødbyen, Copenhagen’s meatpacking district, ‘The Shape of a Minute’ unites four emerging female painters whose work focuses on the body and the sensations of fabric. Jesse Zuo’s luminous palette injects an otherworldly atmosphere into private moments of womanhood, from adjusting a bra strap in Snake Bite (2025) to clasping a necklace in Charms (2025).  In comparison, Alli Conrad focuses on the body’s absence, with oil paintings such as R&R (p. 1) and R&R (p. 2) (both 2025) featuring detailed renderings of rumpled, freshly slept-in silk sheets. Elsewhere, Casey Baden fuses corporeality with fabric: in Two Sides (2025), a nude female sitter stares at her reflection, her acrylic body painted seamlessly over the naturally dyed, woven textile substrate. In Boundless Treasure (2024), meanwhile, Natalia González Martín covers a woman’s chest with a gauzy piece of cloth, framed by two sets of breast-like cakes. Composed as a triptych on wood, the work nods to the tradition of medieval icon painting yet with a playful twist.

Simon Dybbroe Møller | palace enterprise | 20 August – 11 October

Simon Dybbroe Møller’s art often dwells in the murky space between ideas and their representation. At palace enterprise in Vesterbro, the artist premiers a new series of c-type prints, titled ‘Retinal Rift’ (2025). The images are inspired by the red-eye effect that occurs when a camera flash reflects off the blood vessels in the retina. Magnified iterations of his sitters’ gazes cut across the gallery space in strained concentration. The resulting uncanny eyes read like a physiological glitch or the warning signal for some kind of mechanical malfunction. In ‘Sjæl/Seele/Soul’, Dybbroe Møller examines how photography can be both a medium and a subject.

Clare Woods | Martin Asbæk Gallery | 23 August – 27 September 

Clare Woods transports visitors to the British countryside and her rural Hereford studio for her exhibition at Martin Asbæk Gallery. Glossy oil paintings on aluminium capture luscious flora, arranged in vases or growing abundantly in the garden. These verdant scenes speak as much to the blossoming of life as to its decay, paying homage to the grand traditions of still life painting and the memento mori. Woods’s new works are based upon her own archival and personal photographs, zoomed in and cropped to disorienting effect. While vibrant sunflowers and wilting tulips allude to the fleetingness of existence (Mammoth and Slow Parade, all works 2025), details from a stained-glass window further suggest a liminal space between life and death (Bowl of Beauty, Solved and The All Clear). The evocative show title, ‘An Unwatched Voice’, encourages this notion of the in-between.

Marie Munk | Galleri Maria Friis | 15 August – 27 September 

Marie Munk’s experimental practice often ruminates on the interaction between technology and society. ‘Radical Purge’, her first exhibition at Galleri Marie Friis, evokes an eerie future in which our obsession with optimizing our bodies has dissolved the divide between person and machine, cleansing us of our humanity. In her ‘Respiration’ series (all works 2025), Munk presents five identical sculptures, resembling industrial ventilation systems, that reduce lungs to their most basic physical function. Elsewhere, the wall-mounted ‘Fallutopia’ series sees female reproductive organs transformed into serpentine freezer coils – a woman’s fertility made clinical and cold. 

Sandra Mujinga | Den Frie | 21 June – 31 August

Sandra Mujinga’s exhibition at Den Frie conjures a world in which esoteric ancient beings appear to roam and the human body is conspicuously absent. In ‘Sløyfe’ (Loop), new and recent works transport visitors to this parallel dimension, which could be thousands of years in the past or the future. An arcing form composed of aluminium sheets recalls a skeletal creature (When We Were, 2025), while woven forms in crimson fabric, supported by rib-like steel frames, hover overhead, suggesting both shelters and decaying bodies (And My Body Carried All of You, 2024).

The heart of the exhibition is a sculptural sound installation, Time as a Shield (2024), featuring five towering sentinels whose gaping mouths seem to emit a haunting chorus, giving voice to those who might typically bear silent witness. Mujinga has often tackled the representation of the Black body and its surveillance; here, in ‘Shared Breath (1–6)’ (2024), a series of photographic portraits that meld the facial features of several individuals, she addresses the systemic racial biases of digital imaging technology, which cannot effectively register Black skin.

Christiania Biennale

A notable counterpoint to the city’s more institutional offerings, the inaugural Christiana Biennale launches in Copenhagen’s famed Freetown, coinciding with CHART. Its first edition includes a painting exhibition curated by Mai Dengsøe at the Månefiskeren coffee shop; a graffiti wall organized by Simian gallery; and public sculptures by artists such as Esben Weile Kjær and FOS in the Fremtidsskoven neighbourhood, alongside a Nina Beier intervention on Pusher Street.

_{Main image: Sandra Mujinga, And My Body Carried All of You, 2024, woven fabric, metal armatures, dimension variable, Sløyfe’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Den Frie Udstillingsbygning; photograph: Malle Madsen}