Dialogue & Dogmas
Works by Anna Stahn and Henry Heerup

28. March 2025 - 31. August 2025

Feminist wall flowers, flamboyant portraits and artistic visions in black and white! This spring, the Heerup Museum offers a seductive and thought-provoking meeting between two eminent artists from different generations. Contemporary artist Anna Stahn shows brand new works created in dialogue with Henry Heerup’s iconic visual universe – the result is a sensual total installation that goes straight to the heart of both the exuberant and arduous everyday life and challenges our ideas about the perfect life.

JOINT ARTWORK WITH ANNA STAHN AND HENRY HEERUP

With the exhibition Dialog & Dogmas, the Heerup Museum presents an artistic dialogue between Henry Heerup (1907-93) and Anna Stahn (b. 1994), one of Danish contemporary art’s up and coming artists. The Heerup Museum has invited Anna Stahn to engage in dialogue with works from the museum’s collection, and she has taken the word dialogue literally; several of the new works she has created form direct comments regarding Heerup’s works, while others are more inspired by his overall artistic universe and working methods. The exhibition can be experienced as a total installation, where Heerup and Stahn’s works fill the museum’s exhibition hall and merge together as a whole.

EVERYDAY LIFE IN FOCUS

At first glance, Henry Heerup and Anna Stahn’s respective practices may seem fundamentally different, but they have similarities and a kinship. The exhibition illuminates the two artists’ works in a way that both actualizes Heerup and puts Stahn’s practice in an art historical perspective. Both artists work with many different media and express themselves in a figurative imagery that aligns with a world filled with images. The exhibition will feature depictions of everyday life, idealism and portraits, which both Stahn and Heerup are interested in. Stahn, for example, found inspiration in Heerup’s graphic work ‘Juggling with Numbers’ from 1965, which in her world has become the blackboard work ‘The Class’ depicting the school teacher as a kind of socialist icon. Throughout Heerup’s life, he has often produced an idealizing portrayal of the female and maternal figure as fertile and life-giving or engaged in domestic chores. This form of idyllicization stands in many ways in stark contrast to Anna Stahn’s work with portraits of women, which zoom in on the world today and provide a completely different perspective on women’s lives. Stahn’s often sensual depictions of women are contemporary images of a liberated individual, often childless, independent and vain, who works, consumes and is in the world on her own terms and not necessarily subject to traditional roles and divisions of labor between the sexes.

DOGMAS AND DIALOGUE

The exhibition’s works by Heerup have been selected together with Anna Stahn based on dogmas that have helped to delimit the material from the Heerup Museum’s collection, together with a desire to primarily show Heerup’s prints and granite sculptures. The dogmas are: few colors, no podiums – only stone, wood and paper on walls and floors. All of Stahn’s works have been created especially for the exhibition and include woodcuts, panel works, bronzes and furniture sculptures. In the dialogue between the two artists, visitors are invited to experience Stahn’s both poetic and critical practice and immerse themselves in the details of Heerup’s artistic universe. In the woodcut ‘Miss World’, Stahn transforms, for example, a floating globe from Heerup’s linocut ‘Pyramid Cyclist’ (1950) into a spectacular dress on a female figure juggling the planets.

EXHIBITION OPENING

The opening of the exhibition “Dialogue & Dogmas – Anna Stahn and Henry Heerup” will be held at Heerup Museum on Thursday, 27.03. at 5:00 p.m.

PUBLICATION

In relation to the exhibition at Heerup Museum, Anna Stahn has created a new 50-page publication in Danish, where in her universe of drawings and texts, she poetically examines and elaborates on the characters in the exhibition’s works, both Heerup’s and her own. The new book can be purchased in the museum’s shop or webshop.

THE EXHIBITION IS SUPPORTED BY

The Danish National Art Foundation, Arne V. Schlesch’s Foundation, the Danish Tennis Foundation, the Obelske Familiefond, the Toyota Foundation, the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation, the Beckett Foundation and the Grosserer L.F. Foght’s Foundation.