Dialogue exhibitions at Willumsens Museum

In 1976, the first of a series of dialogue exhibitions was arranged, in which living artists are put in context with Willumsen's works. The artists are invited to “enter into dialogue” with Willumsen's art with the aim of illuminating certain themes in his works and have often produced new works for the exhibitions. In an exhibition with Richard Mortensen at the museum in 1976, Mortensen's colorful, abstract images were juxtaposed with Willumsen's paintings and sculptures, thereby highlighting and emphasizing the color in Willumsen's works. In 2007, visual artist Kaspar Bonnén entered into dialogue with Willumsen's sculptures in the exhibition In the shadow of symbols. Sculptures by JF Willumsen and Kaspar Bonnén.  Jan Grarup's press photographs were paired with Willumsen's violent war graphics in In the wake of war in 2014-15. And Willumsen's spectacular nature depictions became the focal point of 2015-16. Nature encounters, where selected works by 11 Danish contemporary artists – including Astrid Kruse Jensen, Box Kath, Eva Koch, Jacob Kierkegaard and John Koerner was displayed at the museum.

Themed exhibitions about JF Willumsen

Thematic exhibitions have often taken as their starting point individual works by Willumsen, his working process or his relationship with contemporary artists. This has illuminated a variety of aspects regarding Willumsen's art and the art historical narrative to which he has contributed. Among the museum's thematic exhibitions are: Color fever, A work without borders. The wedding of the king's son, Role models in the 20th century. A physicist and a mountaineer og Vitale Willumsen.  

Themed exhibitions relating to Willumsen's private art collection, Gamle Samling, have shown a special selection of the collection's works, which in Italian drawings from JF Willumsen's “Old Collection” (I) and (II) from 1984 and 1988 respectively and in the artist-curated exhibition Ekkorum. Thorvaldsen, Willumsen, Jorn and their collections from 2018. In addition, works from Willumsen's art collection have also been shown in dialogue with Willumsen's own works in the exhibition. Pegasus and Tanagra. Antiquity in JF Willumsen's art and collection from 1997, where the antique elements in Willumsen's working process were highlighted, and at the same time the classical works in the Old Collection were explained.

Sensory exhibitions

Willumsens Museum was one of the first in the country to organize sensory exhibitions for children. At the first sensory exhibition in 1979 “Sensation and Coherence” by the visual artists Henrik Have and Susanne Ussing, a stuffed Pegasus, a yellow water bed, foam rubber tufts, broken glass, a cave, scaffolding, wheatgrass and much more became the link between JF Willumsen and the children. In the exhibition “FIGURE”, 1983, the visual artist Kirsten Justesen let children experience sculpture through their bodies. By looking at sculpture, being sculpture and making sculpture, they experienced form and movement in space. In 2020, the museum followed up on this tradition with the traveling exhibition The alchemist's laboratory.

Artist-curated exhibitions

In 1978, the first artist-curated exhibition of an art museum's collection took place in Denmark. It was the exhibition Arms & legs at Willumsen with the Artist Group Arme & Ben, which consisted of the visual artists Bjørn Nørgaard, Per Kirkeby, Poul Gernes, Lene Adler Petersen, Ursula Reuter, Richard Winther and Erik Hagens, as well as the composer Henning Christiansen. The group existed in the period 1976-80 and created several radical and controversial exhibition projects in Denmark and abroad.

The exhibition at Willumsens Museum was groundbreaking for a new understanding of Willumsens' art: His late works, which had been rejected as bad and hidden away in storage, were put up for display and the archives were turned upside down and included in the exhibition, along with sketches and other material that was not normally available to the public.

In a small, accompanying catalogue, the artists eagerly discussed Willumsen's significance for the current art scene. In the foreword, the museum's then director, Leila Krogh, motivated the exhibition with the following words: "The exhibition is an attempt to create a break-up in a static museum". At that time, it was not yet common for museums to hold special exhibitions, and certainly not of such an experimental nature.

The Arms & Legs exhibition was both an artist-curated exhibition and a dialogue exhibition, where the artists created their own works that related to Willumsens. From a historical perspective, the exhibition was groundbreaking for Danish museum history, as it was the first time a museum director gave an artist/artist group carte blanche to delve into the collection and curate based on their own, personal interests.

Since then, the museum has regularly invited artists to curate the collection. Kirsten Justesen curated the exhibition in 1987 Faithless drapery, where she, among other things, wrapped parts of Willumsen's paintings in yellow silk and rotated them 90 degrees to focus on his use of draperies and folds.

The two visual artists Claus Carstensen and Christian Vind curated the exhibition in 2013. Café Dolly with paintings by Francis Picabia (1879-1953), Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) and JF Willumsen. Based on stories, moods and painterly traces, they staged the exhibition in a series of associative spaces that broke with familiar art historical categories.

Christian Vind was also the curator of the exhibition. Ekkorum, which dealt with the phenomenon of artist collections based on the private art collections of Bertel Thorvaldsen, Asger Jorn and JF Willumsen.