Image: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk ; Yves Geant huge jpg
Sophie Calle’s exhibition ‘Something Missing?’ will close at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, on Sunday 6 September 2026. The exhibition, which opened on 26 March, brings together more than 300 photographs, texts and videos across seven major series and additional works in the museum’s West Wing.
Organised by Louisiana in collaboration with Turner Contemporary and De Pont Museum, the presentation focuses on Calle’s sustained engagement with the boundary between fact and fiction, public and private life, and documentary observation and personal narrative. The museum describes the artist as one of the most influential voices in contemporary art, known for combining conceptual rigour with humour, intimacy and emotional directness.
Born in 1953, Calle has worked across five decades on themes including love, loss, guilt, fear, embarrassment and separation. Her projects frequently combine photography and text, using apparently factual records or collected testimony as the basis for works that also depend on speculation, performance and storytelling. The resulting tension between cool distance and personal disclosure is central to her practice.
Among the works included at Louisiana is ‘The Blind’, an early major project from 1986 that has recently entered the museum’s collection. For the series, Calle asked 23 people who had been blind since birth to describe their idea of beauty. Their responses are presented through the interaction of words and images, raising questions about perception, knowledge and the construction of pictures.
The exhibition also features ‘Voir la mer’ (‘To See the Sea’) from 2011. For this series, Calle invited people in Istanbul who had never seen the sea, despite living in a city surrounded by water, and recorded their first encounters with it. The museum’s presentation additionally includes ‘On the Hunt’, a work assembled from personal advertisements published between 1895 and 2019, with the most recent examples taken from Tinder. The project examines changing languages and expectations around dating and relationships.
‘On the Hunt’ will provide the focus for a Louisiana Lecture on Thursday 3 September at 19:30, three days before the exhibition closes. Leila Vestgaard, who owns a collection of 150 personal advertisements published in the book ‘Er der nogen? Autentiske kontaktannoncer’, will speak with anthropologist and researcher Malthe Sebastian Rye Thomsen about dating, desire and self-understanding. The event will take place in the museum’s Concert Hall and requires a separate ticket from museum admission.
Louisiana has previously presented Calle’s work through its collection displays and held the focused exhibition ‘Take Care of Yourself’ in 2010. The museum is also producing a Louisiana Channel interview with Calle at her home in Paris in connection with the current exhibition. ‘Sophie Calle – Something Missing?’ remains on view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art through 6 September 2026.
