Image: MASI Lugano
MASI Lugano will open ‘Kaari Upson. Dollhouse – Una retrospettiva’ on September 5, 2026, staging the first major posthumous retrospective devoted to the American artist Kaari Upson. The museum says the exhibition will be inaugurated at the LAC venue in Lugano at 6 p.m., bringing together work from an artist it describes as one of the most intense and original voices of her generation.
According to the museum’s announcement, Upson was born in 1970 and died in 2021. She became known to European audiences through her participation in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. MASI presents the retrospective as a broad overview of an artist whose practice, developed over a little more than 15 years, ranged across sculpture, video, drawing and installation.
The exhibition is framed around the layered visual language Upson built through those media. The museum says her work explored themes including relationships, the body, illness and loss. No further curatorial details were included in the source material, but the emphasis on those subjects positions the retrospective as a survey of an artist whose work combined intimate psychological terrain with materially diverse forms.
The show is a production of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, in collaboration with Kunsthalle Mannheim and the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana. MASI’s announcement places the exhibition within that international partnership, indicating that the Lugano presentation is part of a larger institutional collaboration rather than a stand-alone local project.
The museum also identifies the work reproduced in its newsletter image as ‘Untitled (Foot Face)’ from 2020-21, credited to the Esmé Trust / Kaari Upson Trust and courtesy of Sprüth Magers. That caption offers one concrete point of contact with Upson’s late practice, while the exhibition title underscores the retrospective’s focus on her broader oeuvre.
For MASI Lugano, the opening adds a significant contemporary-art exhibition to its 2026 programme. The museum’s notice is brief, but it confirms the event date, venue and production partners, and it positions ‘Kaari Upson. Dollhouse – Una retrospettiva’ as a major presentation of an artist whose work had already reached a prominent international platform through Venice in 2019.
