At her untimely death from cancer in 2021, aged 51, Kaari Upson was widely regarded as one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Though her career was cut short, she has left behind a rich, intense and strongly personal body of work that revolves around identity, body, relationships, emotions, illness and loss.

In spite of her relatively short career, she is regarded today as an artist who is well on her way to achieving the status of a modern classic. Upson’s work continues to resonate in contemporary art and forms a kind of bridge between the younger generations and some of the iconic figures from the past – names such as Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenbrug, Lynda Benglis, Mike Kelley and Cindy Sherman.

Louisiana’s exhibition is titled Dollhouse – A Retrospective and is set to be the first retrospective museum exhibition of Upson’s work after her death.

She thus had a dollhouse with contents from her childhood 3D scanned, cast and processed, so that it has become a gigantic work that stands 1:1 in fully human-like dimensions.

By moving between the personal and material, Upson examines the many hidden layers, traumas and complexity of modern American society. At the same time, she is looking for answers to what it means to be human in general at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.

In the Larry Project, she lets the story of her own life story and subconscious blend together with the fictional character Larry, whose remains are pieced together into a “poor man’s version” of Playboy king Hugh Hefner’s mansion. The project includes dolls, images and videos, in which she and Larry often appear side by side in what became a years-long, seemingly unconstrained form of auto-fiction.

In the last years of her life, Kaari Upson became increasingly preoccupied with processing the relationship with her mother artistically. Particularly well-known are ‘Mother’s Legs’, a kind of “forest creation” of tree trunks, formed over casts of Upson’s own knees.

‘Foot Face’, a series of 140 drawings in stark colours, originates from Upson’s final years and shows the dramatic and fraught relationship between mother and daughter as their vitality wanes. They are both fatally affected by cancer, and the mother dies while the series is underway, just a year before the artist herself. The Foot Face series is shown for the first time in this exhibition.