Kaari Upson’s Posthumous Retrospective at the Louisiana Museum

Visitors entering “Doll House,” Kaari Upson’s posthumous retrospective at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, immediately confront a disconcerting threshold: Two panels of simulated chain-link fence, crafted from latex and coated in drab peach acrylic paint that mimics slightly tanned Caucasian skin, hang side-by-side on the wall like a Christian diptych. One panel of the netting has a gaping tear, as if some desperate person—or beast—had tried to break either in or out. This suggestion of escape feels ancient, reinforced by the artwork’s weathered appearance: Its bronzed, peachy surface bears the grimy patina of years of dirt and neglect. Yet the open gash still beckons, like a wound inviting reentry.

This work, titled Trespass (2012), functions like an operatic overture, establishing themes that reverberate throughout Upson’s retrospective—one of the first since her untimely death in 2021, at age 51. Trespass simultaneously evokes a sense of violation and unease yet also a curious attraction. Its flesh tones create a queasy conflation of boundary and body, making spectators acutely aware that they are transgressing into intimate, forbidden territory.

The architecture of invasion that Trespass establishes telegraphs Upson’s central preoccupation with encroachment. Fences typically guard houses, yet Upson first gained recognition through her yearslong “Larry Project” (2005–12), inspired by her literal breaking into her parents’ neighbor’s abandoned home. “Larry,” the titular former resident, serves as both a pseudonym and poetic license, transforming a real person into an imagined character upon whom the artist would project various psychological and social excavations. This voyeuristic transgression follows visitors throughout the exhibition, creating an atmosphere of guilty fascination that makes one’s skin crawl even as it compels closer inspection.

Deeper into the show are other suburban grotesqueries, particularly The Grotto (2008–09), one of the exhibition’s most confounding and complex artworks. Here, a faux-rock formation creates a faux-bourgeois backyard folly, replete with water features—supposedly “Larry’s” bathetic DIY attempt at a Hefner-esque pleasure den. This tableau floods contradictory impressions: The tackiness is pitiful and menacing at once, evoking both sympathy for its aspirational desperation and revulsion at its seedy implications. Small pools reflect cheap battery-powered faux-wax candles flickering amid the ersatz stone formation, while five projected videos within the artwork show the artist’s proxy: sex-doll-like figures lying naked on their backs in states of perpetual, expectant waiting. This staging creates a vertiginous mise en abyme of voyeurism and sadomasochism, advancing the uncanny feeling of simultaneous repulsion and titillation.

These works reveal the paradox of the exhibition itself. To “exhibit” requires taking something out of the house, while its antonym “inhibit” describes what we suppress—traumas, kinks, desires, and other power relations that many prefer to hide behind the walls of the domestic fortress. In the “Doll House,” the boundary between public and private becomes a permeable and generative membrane, allowing us to feel the uncomfortable thrill of accessing secrets.

Upson not only encroaches on other people’s desires and bodies but also attempts to inhabit them vicariously, creating a disorienting multi-ego experience that fragments any sense of stable identity. This fragmentation manifests as multitudes—Kaari plus “Larry,” and later Kaari plus her intimate acquaintances, including her own mother. To express these couplings, the artist often channels this compounded psychology into objects of comfort—beds, prostheses, toys, family heirlooms—treating them as intimate case studies.

Each panel in Trespass measures about the size of a double bed—an object designed to contain two bodies, a form to which the artist returns obsessively. X (King), 2013, features a silicone model of a mattress stained with bright rainbow pigments that somehow manages to feel both celebratory and rotten. Nearby, 192 (2013) presents a similar mattress bearing the residue of two bodies, marked by dirty stains that could signal either neglect or intense use. One imprint shows a larger figure whose silhouette suggests a habitual back-sleeper staring at the ceiling. The other figure’s impression turns away—but does this gesture speak to rejection or acceptance? And who exactly lies in these beds?

Like a loaded Gestalt test, this ambivalence invites multiple contradictory readings. In one, we witness the exhaustion of worn relations, the particular loneliness of sharing a bed with someone from whom you’ve grown distant. Yet the postures could equally reflect two people at easy rest, their turned bodies speaking not of alienation but of familiarity. The fabric stains that punctuate the bedding resist easy categorization, serving as material traces of bodies and time. Their emotional weight oscillates between disquietude and peace, while their interpretive instability forces viewers to confront their own projections about intimacy.

Corporeal archaeology also emerges in Cult of Invalidism (2012), a collection of countless crutches rendered in silicone, charcoal, dirt, and hair. The empty supports evoke infirmity, pain, and abandonment, while the hair embedded in their surfaces creates a particularly visceral response—viewers can almost sense a spirit lurking in the residue. But who were the users of these abandoned devices? The question haunts the space like a chorus of missing voices.

Upson’s continuous tussle with absence and abjection is also evident in Mother’s Legs (2018–19), an installation featuring oblong hanging forms that resemble severed appendages, sized and colored like beef carcasses awaiting processing. These painted wood sculptures, each taller than an average human and suspended slightly above the floor, create a forestlike environment that positions viewers seemingly at knee level, as if they are children playing between or clinging to their mother’s legs. Their gut-punch effect is profound and disturbing, their bloody, bruised tones suggesting violence or disease. At the same time, the scale can induce viewers to feel vulnerable, dependent, and regressed to a preverbal state of need. It’s maternal Gothic at its most unsettling: the mother’s body as both sanctuary and slaughterhouse.

Upson often assumed both Larry’s and her own mother’s identities, producing twinned “doubles” in which she was simultaneously subject and observer—a psychic splitting that viewers spy on as they navigate these installations. Rather than mere sensationalism, this dissolution generates a unique form of empathetic engagement—one that sits with the abject and those marked by it. Perhaps the exhibition’s collection of discarded and damaged traces also serves as a gateway to imagining the lives of others.

Ultimately, we also become complicit in Larry’s pathetic dormitory farce, feel the phantom tosses and turns of past bedfellows, and experience the regression of hiding behind our mother’s legs. Embracing these potentially mortifying yet all-too-banal experiences is how Upson compels us to confront our everyday capacity for both cruelty and tenderness, as well as our complicated relationships with domesticity, desire, and the bodies that contain us. This strategy of enchanting, yet haunted intimacy mirrors Upson’s most significant bequest: She created art that refuses to let viewers remain safely outside the frame, instead dragging them into the messy, uncomfortable business of being human.