Image: Kunstmuseet Brundlund Slot, Aabenraa
‘Franciska Clausen og det underste land’ is on view at Kunstmuseet Brundlund Slot from 20 September 2025 to 6 September 2027. The exhibition presents surrealism as an artistic method for navigating a fragmented world. It brings Museum Sønderjylland’s major works into dialogue with Franciska Clausen’s work.
Museum Sønderjylland describes its holdings as Denmark’s most important collection of Danish surrealism. The exhibition gives attention to Franciska Clausen, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Elsa Thoresen and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. It presents women’s practices as having been shaped by, and having helped shape, surrealism’s visual and conceptual language.
In the 1920s, surrealism emerged as an artistic and intellectual reaction to the collective traumas following the First World War and the global influenza pandemic of 1918. Surrealist artists sought to move away from the rational, the nationalist and the authoritarian, turning instead toward dreams, the unconscious and the irrational as liberating forces. The exhibition asks whether surrealism is a closed chapter of art history or whether it still functions as a method for turning society inside out.
Clausen’s 1967 work ‘Det øverste lag af velfærdsskralden’ examines the welfare state’s darker sides: overconsumption, collective waste, nuclear war and the contemporary gender-political struggle simmering beneath the plastic surface. The exhibition says that, in later life, Clausen became more political than previously through a series of collages and paintings. Clausen’s work is placed in perspective through works by contemporary artists Joachim Koester, Henriette Heise and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen.
