Kaari Upson’s unsettling, grotesque and seductive world in Denmark

Kaari Upson emerged as one of the most unsettling and formally ambitious artists of her generation, crafting a practice that tunnelled into the core of American pathology with relentless psychological acuity. Her visceral, often epic explorations carved a singular path through the psychic underworld of American culture, staging installations that probed the unstable boundaries of identity, memory, and desire. Trained at CalArts, she was part of a generation shaped by the school’s legacy of conceptual rigour and performative experimentation – yet her work remained wholly her own, marked by feverish intimacy and hallucinatory logic.

Upson’s oeuvre is deeply tied to Los Angeles: its excess, detritus, dream logic, and devastating fires. ‘Dollhouse – A Retrospective’, currently on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, is the first comprehensive survey since Upson’s untimely death in 2021, of cancer, at age 51. The exhibition, which is set to travel to Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany and MASI Lugano in Switzerland, traces the evolution of a practice that blurred the lines between fiction, autobiography, and cultural critique. From the psychologically charged multi-part saga Larry Project to her uncanny dollhouse installations – blown-up versions of a dollhouse her mother built for the artist’s daughter – the retrospective encapsulates Upson's ability to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, constructing uncanny stage sets for the rituals of trauma and repetition. Set against the museum's serene coastal backdrop and elegant architecture, the show stands as a poignant tribute to an artist whose oeuvre is as disquieting as it is seductive.

Several galleries in the show are dedicated to The Larry Project (2005–2014), Upson’s decade-long descent, in different media, into the persona of a man whose personal archive – discovered in an abandoned house in the San Fernando Valley – became the foundation for an expansive, fictionalised mythology. Upson obsessively reworked this material, constructing a surrogate figure that became a proxy for cultural fantasies of masculinity, wealth, and decay.

Her recreations of domestic spaces – including a full-scale replica of Larry’s house in thick, buttery latex in the installation Recollection Hysteria (2012) – positions the project as a dark mirror to LA’s libidinal architecture. The piece The Grotto (2008), for example, is a fibreglass replica of the Playboy Mansion’s infamous cave-like swimming pool, reimagined as a claustrophobic site of psychic excavation. Inside, Upson projected videos of herself inhabiting grotesque female archetypes – donning silicone prosthetics of exaggerated breasts and genitalia – while engaging in phone-sex roleplay and improvised monologues.

‘Her work is outrageously painterly,’ curator Anders Kold tells Wallpaper*, drawing attention to the way Upson mixed pigments into latex and used airbrushing and paint on the soft, pliable surfaces of sculptures resembling deflated furniture. This painterly quality is exemplified in Mother’s Legs (2018–19), a haunting installation of elongated urethane forms suspended like dismembered limbs. Cast from termite-riddled wood from a tree that once stood outside Upson’s childhood home, each form is fused with knee casts –some from Upson herself, others from her mother – creating hybrids of human and arboreal anatomy. Their missing feet and unnatural proportions evoke dislocation and loss, while the palette of fleshy pinks and sickly tones transforms the forest-like arrangement into a dreamlike procession of maternal surrogates, both tender and uncanny.

Upson’s work frequently draws on her mother’s complex personal history – born in the former GDR, she left East Germany and lived in the West before meeting Upson’s father, whom she followed to the United States, seeking the American Dream. This narrative of migration, reinvention, and utter adaptation – not to say self-negation – underpins Upson’s recurring use of her mother’s image and body, exploring themes of femininity and inherited trauma. Upson’s father, on the other hand, is only referenced directly in a single work: Untitled (2020-21) shows a footless, handless figure in blue jeans and a checkered cowboy shirt lying face down, with five ketchup-red bottles wedged into its back, like knives.

Untitled (Foot Face), Upson’s final and unfinished series, comprises 140 ink drawings made as a daily visual diary. Each work repeats the pairing of Upson’s face and her late mother’s foot – symbols of self and origin. Created during a period marked by her mother’s death from cancer and the recurrence of the artist's own illness, the series traces a gradual dissolution. As the drawings progress, the foot vanishes, leaving behind disembodied eyes adrift in dense crosshatching. Shown here for the first time, the series is a lush meditation on grief, and the quiet erosion of identity at life’s end, eerily continuing the posthumous reckoning with a body of work that continues to speak, even in silence.

‘Dollhouse’ is at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art until 26 October, louisiana.dk/en