Dialogue & Dogma

Duo Exhibition with works from the archive of Danish artist Henry Heerup (1907-1993) and new works by Anna Stahn at Museum Heerup 2025.

The Heerup Museum invited Anna Stahn to enter into a dialogue with works from the museum's collection and based on the archive, Stahn has selected works from Heerup's collection and taken the dialog literally, which is why several of Stahn's new works for the exhibition are a direct comment on the selected Heerup works and inspired by Heerup's universe and working method. For example, Stahn was inspired by Heerup's graphic work ‘Tal Artister’ from 1965, which in her translation has become the blackboard work ‘The Class’ with the schoolteacher teaching students, the schoolteacher as a kind of socialist icon.

The exhibition can be seen as a total installation, where Heerup and Stahn's works fill the museum's exhibition hall and merge as a whole.

At first glance, the practices of Heerup and Stahn may seem very different, but they share similarities and a kinship. The exhibition sheds new light on the two artists' works in a way that both actualizes Heerup and puts Stahn's practice in an art historical perspective. Both artists' practices express themselves in a figurative imagery featuring depictions of everyday life, idealism and portraits of women.

Throughout Heerup's life, he has often produced an idealized portrayal of the female and the mother figure; the fruitful, life-giving figure and the intimate portrayal of a woman engaged in domestic chores. This idealization is a contrast to Anna Stahn's portrayal of women; Stahn is also interested in portraits of women but zooms in on our world today, which gives a completely different view of women's lives than Heerup. Stahn's often sensual depictions of women are contemporary images of liberated individuals, often childless, independent, stressed and vain, they work, consume and are in the world on their own terms and not necessarily subject to the traditional division of roles and labor.

The works by Heerup in the exhibition have been selected together with Anna Stahn based on dogmas that have helped to delimit the material from the Heerup Museum's collection, along with a desire to primarily show graphics and stone. The dogmas are: few colors, no podiums, only stone, wood and paper and works on walls and floor. All of Stahn's works were created especially for the exhibition and include graphics, bronze sculptures, blackboard works and furniture sculptures. The dialog between the two artists can help to invite you to look into the details of Heerup's universe; for example, a floating globe in Heerup's graphic work Pyramid Cyclist from 1950 is transformed into a spectacular dress with a globe and planets on the woman in Stahn's Japanese woodcut Miss World.