Kunstkritikk

We hope our readers will support our work in advancing an informed and critical conversation about contemporary art! Link in bio 🙏

“Although the exhibition does not particularly invite physical touch, it nevertheless suggests an ambition to restore art’s auratic attachment to real places and bodies, and to reactivate its social context and function.” Review by STIAN GABRIELSEN Link in bio 📷Rajni Perera & Marigold Santos, Efflorescence/The Way We Wake, 2023. Photo: Marco Zorzanello.

“Personally, I boycotted the pavilions of Israel, Russia, and the MAGA-sanctioned USA pavilion; thus, I have nothing to say about their artistic content. Apart from that, I walked around for four intense and blister-inducing days in the narrow streets of Venice, in an attempt to see as many of this year’s 99 national pavilions as possible.” – MARIANN ENGE on the National pavilions at the 61st Venice Biennale. Link in bio 🔔 📷 Florentina Holzinger, Seaworld Venice, Opening Étude, 2026. Photo: Helena Manhartsberger. Stay tuned for a review of the main exhibition In Minor Keys that will conclude our coverage from Venice,

Folklore and transgressive creatures by BENJAMIN ORLOW, TORI WRÅNES, and KLARA KRISTALOVA. HELEN KORPAK reviews How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?, in THE NORDIC COUNTRIES PAVILION at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. 🧚‍♂️ LINK IN BIO ”Anna Mustonen’s stated ambition has been to create a group exhibition in which the pavilion’s architecture acts as “a fourth artist.” At first, I dismissed the comment as a typical curatorial platitude. But during the opening event, when I witness a performance in which Tori Wrånes, dressed in a gigantic headless troll costume, slowly dragged herself up the steps to the small platform beside the pavilion, my perspective changed.” 📸 Tori Wrånes’ performance at The Nordic Countries Pavilion. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen. 📡 Stay tuned for more reviews, highlights, and dispatches from the 61st Venice Biennale.

MAJA MALOU LYSE’s Venice exhibition is a visual (s)explosion! Yet, its ambition to thematise today’s low birth rates dissolves in an avalanche of grinding hips and bobbing breasts. NORA ARRHENIUS HAGDAHL reviews THE DANISH PAVILION at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. 🍒 LINK IN BIO ”The Danish Pavilion appears as a perfect contemporary export catalogue: Ozempic-thinned janky bodies, sperm and eggs from Denmark’s competitive reproductive industry – and let’s not forget ’gladporno’ (feelgood porn), a venerable Danish export commodity.” 📸 Maja Malou Lyse/DIS, Things to Come, 2026. Photo: Zoe Chait. 👀 Stay tuned for more reviews, highlights, and dispatches from the 61st Venice Biennale.

“I still remember putting the Ann Demeulemeester skirt on for the first time – the bias-cut, the dangling black cotton ribbons that you could wrap around yourself, the asymmetry, the black crepe against my skin. I was enraptured by the way she gave the wearer choices, with ties and buttons, in how they could show and wrap their own body. All this came back to me as I entered the large glass doors of MoMu Fashion Museum of Antwerp and met the long lines of people waiting to come in to see the show.” Artist YVETTE BRACKMAN on THE ANTWERP SIX at MoMU Fashion Museum Antwerp. Link in bio. 📷: The Antwerp Six, 1985 ©️Foto: Patrick Robyn.

Nordic nostalgia and a fraught sponsorship collaboration at Market Art Fair in Stockholm. Report by FRANS JOSEF PETERSSON LINK IN BIO “Has the present become so unbearable that art’s only response is to look away? There is much to suggest so, and this tendency is amplified at Market Art Fair.” 📸 Arvida Byström, PET, still from AI-generated video with voice-over, 2025. Byström is presented at Market Art Fair by Steinsland Berliner Gallery from Stockholm.

Artists MADELEINE ANDERSSON, TOBIAS BRADFORD, and ARVIDA BYSTRÖM link up with Kunstkritikk’s NORA ARRHENIUS HAGDAHL for a no-holds-barred discussion on AI slop, sex dolls, nudify apps, hentai, LLMs, Instagram, TikTok, Ozempic, deepfakes, and more. 🙌 LINK IN BIO 📸 Frida Vega Salomonsson

The inaugural exhibition of the New Museum’s expansion is undone by an inability to leave anything out. Review by ABIRAMI LOGENDRAN Link in bio 📷New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. Exhibition view, New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

"The works from the Gelman Collection will be seen in Oslo, Berlin, and Riehen. This is, in itself, a significant cultural event. The question is not whether these exhibitions should take place, but how they should be shaped in ways that reflect the evolving role of museums today." Commentary by KATYA GARCÍA-ANTÓN on an upcoming tour of works by FRIDA KAHLO that brings attention to the uncertain future of a collection rooted in Mexico’s cultural history. Link in bio 👆 📷 Frida Kahlo, El abrazo de amor de el universo, la tierra (México), yo, Diego, y el Señor Xolotl, 1949. Photo: The Gelman Collection and The Vergel Foundation.

“There is a particular category of images that continues to fascinate and puzzle me. I call them ’showcase images.’ The simplest definition is that they are images in which something, often another image, is being shown to the viewer and held up for scrutiny. Over the years, I have built a small, unsystematic collection of this kind of image, often added to when friends send me new examples they have come across in an exhibition or a book. My digital archive contains some twenty-five images spanning the 15th century to the present, and I think it is fair to say that the collection came into being and grew during the years in which I taught at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.” I Am Showing You This Because it Matters is an essay by artist HENRIETTE HEISE. Link in bio.   📷: Art student Frederik Worm holding up a photocopy of an image from Laurence Stern’s novel Tristram Shandy in front of a patterned piece of textile draped over a stretcher frame. Studio visit at the academy in Copenhagen, 2014. Image courtesy of Henriette Heise.

“Karlberg’s target is not painting’s freewheeling present, but the dynamics of value that sustain it. The show rehearses the fantasy of success in the global art world, while exposing its obstacles as shaped less by exclusions of gender, race, and class, than by a kind of desperate provincialism. As Daniel Birnbaum’s gallery text affirms: “this kind of business card cannot belong to a nobody.” MATTHEW RANA reviews MARIE KARLBERG at Issues Gallery in Stockholm. LINK IN BIO 👉👉👉 📸 Marie Karlberg, John, acrylics on linen, 51 × 89 cm, 2026.