Exhibitions opening in 2023

“In 2023 we take the visitors on speculative journeys. We explore ideas through weaving, collage, assemblage. We plunge the audience into worlds that enfold them in alternative ideas, magic, and surrealism to examine arcane and future knowledge.  2023 is a social space full of artistic discovery. Our artistic guides are some of the most celebrated artists currently working, and those who have profoundly changed the way we see and think about our emotional, political, and psychological existence.”

Rebecca Matthews, Museum Director, ARoS

Cindy Sherman – Tapestries
4 February – 5 June 2023, level 5 Focus-gallery

Few artists have defined the era of post modernity more than Cindy Sherman. Internationally renowned for her masquerades of self-portraiture that scrutinize identity; the role of the female under the patriarchal gaze of cinema; the role of the female muse for the surrealist artist; the celebrity construction at the heart of portraiture; the typology of faces and figures, Sherman has made works that exemplify the shifting, morphing sense of the self in our era of personality consumption and hyper-visuality.

Sherman now brings 21st century ‘face’ technology together with the traditional craft of tapestry making.  Her first major exploration of a medium beyond photography. Sherman has for several years been making self-portraits, ‘selfies’ that distort, alter, and caricature her features to produce a series that she originally ‘shared’ on her social media site. Created using the face altering platforms available for iPhones and Androids, she has amassed a series of grotesques and imaginary personae. 

Too small in format to be reproduced in photography at epic scale Sherman has now enlisted the fine and revered craft of tapestry to elevate these humble, shape shifted selves to the importance and permanence of the official portraits made for nobility and the wealthy.

The tapestries are created by master makers in Belgium where tapestry making has been a highly valued practice since the 15th century. Sherman revels in the absurdity and the perversity of transforming that which is considered ephemeral and fleeting into such historical legacy and perpetuity.

Erró – The Power of Images
1 April – 3 September 2023, level 5

The first opportunity for international audiences to see the vast outputs of Erró’s feverish pop-culture commentaries.

The exhibition Erró - The Power of Images shows the power of the collage technique in a variety of works, from small paper cut-outs to large-scale paintings.  Erró's works explore a new media-based reality where we are constantly exposed to a flux of images varying from the commercial to the political, effecting our idea of reality, thus becoming as fragmented as the collages of the artist himself.  

The ambition of the exhibition Erró – The Power of Images is to create the largest exhibition on Erró in Denmark to date, and thereby present his impressive oeuvre to the Danish public. The exhibition shows Erró's artistic process that has been continuously renewed and enriched. His oeuvre ranges from art and film to comics, science and technology, history and politics, advertising, and propaganda. 

Erró has reshaped and deconstructed his visual material to create an art that challenges authority and expresses a playful and a sharp political and artistic talent. Through his works, Erró establishes links between historical events, artistic genres, and methods. They form a powerful visual narrative that highlights the digital and global developments that have taken place in the artist's 90 years of life. 

Erró - The Power of Images has been created in a Nordic, inter-institutional collaboration with Reykjavík Art Museum. The exhibition is produced by Reykjavík Art Museum and planned in collaboration with ARoS Aarhus Art Museum.

Annette Messager
27 May – 22 October 2023, level 1

The work of celebrated French artist, Annette Messager, delivers a visceral encounter through her installations of objects, sculptures and environments that dwell in the realm of the feminine and political imaginary. 

Seamstress, biologist, storyteller, alchemist, trickster – Messager’s artistic personae create encounters that explore the grotesque, gothic and folkloric. Oversized stuffed objects – body parts, rats, scissors, gigantic keys, combs – a whole array of items, create a carnival, a circus of magically mortal contemplations. Watercolour drawings bleed and blot to form corporeal wallpapers and ritualistic actions – direct and intuitive responses – diaristic exorcisms of personal dramas.

Red saturates, light creates shadow plays, and blackness brings an occult parade of animal protesters who enter the city of soot and ashes. Paris burnt, Notre Dame destroyed, The Eiffel Tower bent, blunted, all monuments disheveled and damaged - an old empire in stages of collapse and detritus. The animals – custodians of the environment - take their revenge and climb over the city carcass to occupy ground. 

Messager says of her work: ‘I believe that artists don’t create anything, but are here to sort, show and highlight what already exists, give it shape and sometimes reformulate it.’ In her works she exaggerates and refashions that which has been stable, solid, and authoritative to suggest an alternative view from the position of the magical woman.

This exhibition is created in cooperation with LaM (Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne), France, and it opens new institutional and artistic networks and partners for ARoS.

Susan Philipsz
1 July – 3 December 2023, level 5 Focus-gallery

Susan Philipsz works with sound. Voice and music are her materials. Philipsz has explored the psychological and sculptural potential of sound as it multiplies, bounces and swirls in space. The artist's immersive environments of architecture and song heighten the visitor’s engagement with their surroundings while inspiring thoughtful introspection.

The music Philipsz selects – which has ranged from sixteenth century ballads and Irish folk tunes to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust – responds specifically to the space in which the work is installed. While each piece is unique, the storylines and references are often recognizable, exploring familiar themes of loss, longing, hope, and return. These universal narratives trigger personal reactions while also temporarily bridging the gaps between the individual and the collective, as well as interior and exterior spaces.

Susan Philipsz trained in sculpture in Scotland and Northern Ireland. She represents a re-engagement with the attitudes and ideas formed in the 1970s based on concepts of ephemerality. She has expanded the field of sound sculptural work by intersecting it with space and place to produce sculptural, architecture, social happenings that live in the ephemerality of chance sound encounters. 

As she has said: “The reason why I use sound is because it defines space and triggers memory. My intent is to adopt its psychological effect to make people aware of the place they’re in.”

A Surreal Shock – Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
7 October 2023 – 21 January 2024, level 5

The exhibition has been created in close collaboration with Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. With more than 100 works, the exhibition features important works by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, alongside major works by Man Ray, Joan Miró, Leonora Carrington, Eileen Agar, and Max Ernst, among others. The works in the exhibition are highly varied in use of materials, technique, and style, reflecting the different Surrealists’ working methods and ideas; instead of adopting a single comprehensive style of their own, the artists pursued a new kind of beauty that they find in their dreams and the subconscious. A Surreal Shock will give an extensive introduction to the surrealist movement that today once again finds itself as inspiration for a new generation of artists.

The exhibition will also present Danish surrealists within an international context giving the Danish artists a space in the international surrealist movement presenting the many similarities but also some of the differences between the Danish and international movement. The rewarding collaboration with Bojimans Van Beunigen surrounding A Surreal Shock has given ARoS a unique opportunity to present not only masterworks by artists that are rarely exhibited in Denmark but placing them side by side with their Danish contemporaries presents a unique opportunity in Danish art history.

The Cosmos Within
2 December 2023 – 7 April 2024, level 1

The Cosmos Within presents a group of international artists working across time and place at the intersection of art, healing, and magic. So far, Tori Wrånes, Rachel Rose, Emma Kunz, Emil Westman Herz, Susanne Treister, Ei Arakawa, Patricia Dominguez, Tabita Rezaire, Zheng Bo, and Evan Ifekoya are among the artists in this exhibition. Across time and place, they all work with art as a kind of portal leading us into alternative and sensory worlds where contemporary human relationships with nature, the body and spiritual life are rethought and revitalised.

Through a wide range of media, including involving drawings and paintings by Swiss Emma Kunz and British Susanne Treister, a new performance by Norwegian Tori Wrånes, and all-encompassing video and installation works by American Rachel Rose, French-Guinean Tabita Rezaire, Chinese Zheng Bo, British-Nigerian Evan Ifekoya, Japanese Ai Arakawa and Chilean Patricia Dominguez, we are introduced to a range of artists who mediate and thematize the world's inherent spiritual forces through art. Together they act as mediators of 'new cosmologies', either reviving mystical and spiritual practices and traditions, or otherwise linking spiritual thought and philosophy with today's - and tomorrow's - screen-spinning and technological society.

In a time of crisis, it is no coincidence that both artists and audiences seek alternative communities of thought, either by constructing new worlds or by reviving old ones. Therefore, with The Cosmos Within, ARoS aims to inspire other ways of understanding today's modern society, which is otherwise defined by pervasive digital systems, climate change, and political, social, and religious conflicts.

ARoS Public Engagement 2023

ARoS Public Engagement 2023 offers a diverse, inter-artistic and innovative programme of activities that will take place at the museum and in the surrounding community. In 2023 ARoS will, among other activities, host a series of innovative knitting sessions, launch a monthly performance programme and, in addition, invite professional performers to facilitate creative workshops for ARoS audiences.

ARoS Public Engagement is also looking forward to an upcoming collaboration with Aarhus Theatre in connection with the special exhibition A Surreal Shock – Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, which will engage audiences in a cross-artistic, celebratory encounter between the visual and performing arts.

With Public Engagement, ARoS wants to actively contribute to the international definition of the museum of the future by exploring what the museum of the future is, who the museum of the future is for and where you meet it. With special emphasis on the word 'engagement', ARoS Public Engagement wants to mark a new kind of partnership across institutions and disciplines - all with audience participation at the center.

Continuing from 2022 are the two exhibitions Franciska Clausen – Every Facet and Chiharu Shiota – Invisible Line. ARoS also opens a new acquisition for the collection in December 2022 – the installation Colony Howl by Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe.

Franciska Clausen – Every Facet
Until February 26 2023, level 5

Exhibiting paintings, sketches, photographs, archival material and revealing new research, Franciska Clausen – Every Facet illuminates Clausen's wide-ranging approach to art and her bold experimentation with different styles and themes. The exhibition demonstrates the way Clausen also manifested multiple artist identities that unfolded simultaneously. 

Franciska Clausen – Every Facet contains almost 200 works and is part of the ARoS on-going series of exhibitions focused upon iconic Danish artists from the beginning of the 20th century. The exhibition works with seven themes: the avant-garde, the portrait painter, the modernist, the machine aestheticist, the surrealist, the designer, and the poster artist Franciska Clausen.

Chiharu Shiota – Invisible Line
Until 16 April 2023, level 1

Berlin based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota weaves thoughts and memories into caves of contemplation with coloured threads that produce a tension between being and nothingness.  All energy rises from objects that are transformed into phantasmagoric entities as a result of Shiota’s intricate interlacing work that creates an immersive space of light and darkness, and a cocoon of atmosphere. Thoughts of mortality - loss, death - but also joy and exuberance are explored by Shiota in her work.

Shiota’s works suspend the life force. Stillness and movement are held in a momentary balance as if her objects are in the eye of a storm yet strangely calm. Sometimes the energy is pulled inwards as if imploding a body that waits to exhale and stretch. These ideas are explored in a number of significant works brought together for ARoS in the exhibition Invisible Line. In Shiota’s work the personal and universal ideas coexist simultaneously for an audience seeking companionship through times that need to feel equilibrium in the tempest of experience.

Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Colony Howl
From 16 December 2022, level 0

In autumn 2020, ARoS presented a comprehensive installation exhibition by the American artist duo Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe entitled Colony Sound. The exhibition unfortunately shortly after its opening had to close due to Covid-19, but subsequently the museum has acquired parts of the exhibition with generous support from Ny Carlsbergfondet. The installation Colony Howl can now be experienced in the ARoS installation gallery at level 0.

Being in Freeman & Lowe's installations is like stepping onto a film set where the other actors have gone home, and the cameras are off. Since 2008 they have been working on a variety of historical and fictional narratives in their large, labyrinthine, and architectural installations. Freeman & Lowe's works explore the dynamics between a society and the counterculture that emerges in opposition to this. The works confront us both physically and intellectually. 

The main narrative is about the fictional city called "San San", from the literary sci-fi tale The Year 2000, written by futurist Herman Kahn in 1967. Here Kahn imagined that the cities along the American west coast from San Diego to San Francisco would grow together to form a gigantic urban complex. The area was named 'San San'.

Press photos can be freely downloaded from Dropbox when giving due credit.

For further information, please contact: 
presse@aros.dk / 0045 2888 4464