Contemporary Art
Exhibitions
Valdemars Slot hosts a seasonal programme of contemporary art exhibitions and events between May and September each year, taking place across the palace and outbuildings.
For its inaugural arts season, historical portraits from the Estate’s collection by Carl Gustaf Pilo (SE, 1711–93) and Jens Juel (DK, 1745–1802) are exhibited alongside site-specific installations by international contemporary artists including Jirí Georg Dokoupil (CZ), Hanne Lippard (GB), and Pernille With Madsen (DK).
Jiří Georg Dokoupil
Czech-German, b. 1954
Known for his experimental techniques, using soot, tyres, milk, and even a whip to make a painting, Jiří Georg Dokoupilhas exhibited extensively across Europe, Asia and America. For Valdemars Slot’s inaugural season, Dokoupil presents his renowned Soap-Bubble series in the palace’s first floor and chapel. Toying with the domestic setting, his sculptural furniture welcomes visitors in the Entrance Hall with an invitation to pose and become part of the spectacle. Curated by Reiner Opoku, the presentation draws on a significant solo exhibition at Biblioteca Nazionale in Venice (2024), which took place during the 60th Venice Biennale, and toured to Osthaus Museum, Hagen (2024–25).
Dokoupil first came to critical attention in the early 1980s as co-founder of Cologne’s Mülheimer Freiheit group, whose exuberant figurative paintings flouted artistic convention. Spanning four decades, his Soap-Bubble Paintings embody the provocative spirit that still defines Dokoupil’s practice. The artist mixes water with soap-lye and pigment, blowing bubbles through a metal wand to produce luminous imprints. Whilst this spontaneous process recalls Abstract Expressionism, the emblematic forms resonate with traditions of vanitas and still life. Viewed from a hidden balcony, a pair of specially commissioned paintings hangs inside the chapel. The architecture combines subtle Scandinavian features with baroque flourishes, activating the paintings’ symbolism and flamboyant energy.
Dokoupil’s blown-glass Homemade Venetian Bubbles are wittily presented as found objects, arranged on bottle racks in reference to Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) canonical readymades. Collaborating with Czech glassmakers, Dokoupil asked the craftsmen to disregard their training and resist the urge to shape the glass into regular forms. Alongside these works, the artist’s Open Bubbles Condensation Cubes – a nod to his former teacher Hans Haacke (b. 1936) – are encased in vessels filled with water, echoing the palace’s coastal surroundings. The sculptures’ metallic surfaces mirror the viewer, pointing to the unpredictable role of context in shaping our experience of an artwork.
Balancing the spontaneous and controlled, Dokoupil’s Soap-Bubbles underline the stable authority embedded in the palace’s regal art and architecture. Though their unpredictable forms challenge conventions of craft and authorship, the bubbles’ soft curves and gilded glamour mirror the rococo style of Carl Gustaf Pilo’s (1711–93) three royal portraits – installed in the ballroom for centuries. Whilst these paintings were designed to convey power sustained over generations, Dokoupil’s ephemeral Soap-Bubbles joyfully invite us to live in the moment.
“There is a dreamy, twilight-zone quality to Dokoupil’s abstractions. The oddly mutating, seemingly weightless colorful shapes, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, have an iridescent, quasi-psychedelic aura, one that is all the more intense when they overlap and converge, flooding the canvas with a mystifying glow.”
Donald Kuspit
Art Critic, Artforum (2014)
Pernille With Madsen
Danish, b. 1972
Pernille With Madsen is known for her multidisciplinary installations that transform recognisable imagery to upend expectations of time and scale. This three-part installation leads us on a dizzying journey through the vast Riding Hall. Retaining traces of its past – as a performance hall and grain store – the site becomes a frame through which to explore the ways we understand historical spaces. Born locally on Funen, With Madsen has exhibited widely and recently garnered critical attention for public works commissioned for Copenhagen Metro and Aarhus University in Denmark (2024).
Bending our bodies to glimpse and gaze, the installation points towards endless possibilities for discovery. With Madsen reimagines the Riding Hall as the stage for an archeological dig, excavating the remains of three grain silos. Inside the craters she reveals the disembodied toes of a classical statue, partially buried in sand. By hinting at a huge, hidden figure, this ‘fragment’ unsettles the expected relationship between a contemporary artwork and viewer. Slipping between illusion and actuality, sculpture and relic, With Madsen unpicks conventions to “massage the imagination”.
If this sculpture hints at an object so large that it can be glimpsed only piecemeal, With Madsen also draws us in on a miniature scale. The artist presents a group of knotted, clawed forms, recalling primordial creatures or homunculi. Magnified inside a vitrine, the work recalls a Renaissance wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities which, by collecting rare specimens from across the globe, was supposed to symbolise its owner’s power. These tiny sculptures mock such presumptions – hinting instead towards magical unknowns, waiting to be found.
In disorientating contrast to the raw site below, an LED screen sits perched on a balcony. Human figures, composed from fizzing pixels, dissolve together into abstract forms before breaking apart again in an endless loop. What looks like a digital mistake is in fact produced by countless polystyrene balls, fixed to the dancers’ clothing. Just as the artist’s Greco-Roman facsimile mimics the trace or remains of an artwork, this digital snow is not just the ‘footprint’ of an image, but the full picture.
“Western culture is still bound by the ideals of the Enlightenment – believing that we can order and oversee all life. As individuals, we believe in what we are presented with – the earth is round; there are microscopic ‘bears’ that can tolerate -50°F – even if it is not something "we have seen with our own eyes". I want to bring a different kind of attention to organic life, as something beyond scientific evidence. To open the imagination to the fantastic.”
Pernille With Madsen
Hanne Lippard
British-Norwegian, b. 1984
Hanne Lippard’s live performances and sound installations investigate the spoken word as an instrument to shape meaning. At Valdemars Slot, Lippard greets visitors with a loud Hiccup. Echoing through the entrance tunnel like a windpipe, her installation foregrounds the unpredictable physical body where speech begins. In the palace grounds Lippard reimagines Ruin – a work made for the Una Boccata d’Arte in Milan (2022) – transforming the vaulted barn into a soundscape to evoke centuries of use. Lippard is currently Artist in Residence at Deutsche Akademie in Rome and was recently awarded the Hamburger Bahnhof’s prestigious Nationalgalerie Prize 2024.
Originally used for storing and drying grain, the barn’s round central window and lofty vaults give the structure the feel of a medieval church. Lippard heightens this atmosphere through the rhythmic, ritualistic tenor of her speech, peppered with spiritual language of “believing” and “conscience”. Beginning tentatively with a passive statement – “a ruin is reconstructed through speech” – Lippard moves to address language as power – “You can speak a house into being”, she declares, “you can speak a word into meaning”. Her pauses lend certain words the feel of a quotation, as if she is gathering up ”walls, ceiling, window” from a shared depository of “babble” or “rubble”.
Through devices such as repetition, shifting intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, Lippard makes us aware of language as a tool to give significance, but also its malleability, and its tendency towards rupture or ambiguity. As her speech develops, the “transitory” form of the barn and the fragmentary language used to describe it evolve into reflections on the fragility of human life. “What is, is. What isn’t, isn’t. Or,” Lippard considers, before breaking into a torrential list – closing, as if by explanation with “bodily bother”.
Throughout Ruin, presence and absence frame and are framed by one another in an endless game of chicken and egg. Pivoting on the homophone (hole/ whole), she states: “A hole is only a hole when it is surrounded by matter to make it matter”. Reaching for the double meaning of matter to identify significance with physical substance, Lippard echoes the alliance of being and meaning, half-rhymed in her initial lines. Though she quips “I believe, but not enough to be buried with good conscience”, something extra is found in the slippage between words: “dust to dust, soil to soul”.
“The barn is a functional space with a history, something you can feel as you enter. I’m always fascinated by places of labour which have lost their function, there’s a residue of the activity that took place there, a sort of spirit or geist found in its structures.”
Hanne Lippard
Artist Bios
Jiří Georg Dokoupil (b. 1954 Krnov, Czech Republic)
Founding member of the young wild and Mülheimer Freiheit collectives, Dokoupil has participated in three major biennials including Venice (1993), Documenta 7, Kassel (1987) and Sao Paulo (1985). He is represented in prominent public collections worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California.
Hanne Lippard (b. 1984 Milton Keynes, UK)
Lippard has recently been awarded with the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2024 and is a Prize Fellow at the Deutschen Akademie Villa Massimo in Rome (2024–25). She has exhibited and performed at institutions including MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; CCA, Berlin (2022); FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2021); MHKA, Antwerp (2021); and RIBOCA2, Riga (2020).
Pernille With Madsen (b. 1972 Funen, Denmark)
With Madsen has recently completed prominent public commissions at Aarhus University (2024) and Copenhagen Metro, Enghave Brygge (2024). She has exhibited internationally at institutions including CCCB, Barcelona; Justus Lipsius Building, Brussels and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou. Her work is included in the collections of Horsens Kunstmuseum and New Carlsberg Foundation in Denmark.