ORDRUPGAARD – AN INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM DESTINATION
You will find Ordrupgaard in scenic, peaceful surroundings just 10 km north of Copenhagen. The museum offers a unique array of world-class art, design and architecture. The park has art to enjoy, too.
Monet, Degas, Gauguin – and HammershøiAt Ordrupgaard, you can explore one of Northern Europe’s most important collections of French Impressionism, featuring leading figures like Monet, Degas and Gauguin. In addition, visitors can enjoy an exquisite collection of Danish art focusing on Vilhelm Hammershøi and his contemporaries – as well as a succession of special exhibitions.
Finn Juhl, Zaha Hadid and SnøhettaYou can also visit the former home of furniture designer Finn Juhl. Here his iconic furniture enters into a lively dialogue with the great Danish artists of modernism, just like when Finn Juhl lived here. Star architect Zaha Hadid and the award-winning design studio Snøhetta have also made their imprint on Ordrupgaard.
Art in the open airIn the park, you can explore works by leading contemporary artists. All visitors can give their inner child free rein, because here you are welcome to run, jump and climb on the art. Of course, you may simply prefer to settle on the lawn and enjoy the many sensory impressions offered by the scenic park. Ever since the couple who founded Ordrupgaard, Wilhelm and Henny Hansen, moved here in 1918, a pleasant, informal atmosphere has infused this place. It still does, making the museum popular with all generations.
In the café, the chefs conjure up dishes from fresh Nordic ingredients to provide pit-stop refreshments with breathtaking views to green parkland.
Temporary exhibitions:
AI WEIWEI – WATER LILIES #1, 31 May 2024 – 19 January 2025
Ai Weiwei, a highly celebrated voice in the world art, has set up his installation Water Lilies #1 (2022) at Ordrupgaard. This spectacular work comprises more than 650,000 Lego bricks and, with an impressive length of fifteen metres, it is Ai Weiwei’s biggest Lego work to date. The enormous installation reconfigures one of the most iconic impressionist paintings, namely Claude Monet’s equally monumental triptych Water Lilies (1914–26), now at MoMA in New York. Whereas Monet excludes any hint of his own sorrowful life in his depiction of the tranquil beauty of the water lily pond, Ai Weiwei inserts a black portal among the colourful water lilies, thus unlocking the narrative about his formative childhood years spent with his father in a Chinese work camp. The exhibition shows how Monet’s painting is woven into Ai Weiwei’s gripping life story to re-emerge as a confrontation with the systematic suppression of the freedom of speech, which the now exiled artist, and his father before him, have experienced on body and soul in their native China.
FLORA YUKHNOVICH. INTO THE WOODS - 18 September 2024 – 19 January 2025
British artist Flora Yukhnovich (b.1990) is acclaimed for her beautiful paintings in which she adopts the language of Rococo and Baroque, reimagining the dynamism of works by eighteenth-century artists through a filter of contemporary cultural references. Ordrupgaard now presents her first museum exhibition outside the UK. For this occasion, Yukhnovich has created four new paintings shown alongside recent works on loan from collections across the world. The female body is the recurrent motif in the sensually fabling canvases, leading the audience into a veritable forest of references.