Kaari Upson: Dollhouse—A retrospective

The American artist Kaari Upson (1970–2021) was one of the most prominent voices of her generation. In her sculptures, installations, videos and drawings, she questions the boundaries of memory, identity and social reality, transforming personal biographical experiences from her California homeland into universal human stories.

Upson received international attention through her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2019. Her work has also been honoured at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Already in 2020, works by the artist were shown here for the first time and the work Mother’s Legs was acquired for the collection. Now follows the first major museum retrospective in Germany, which invites an intensive encounter with an artist whose work continues to touch, disturb and fascinate us even after her early death. 

Highlights of the exhibition include the installation THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, a larger-than-life doll’s house, and works from Upson’s latest series, Foot Face, which are being shown for the first time.

Dollhouse—secrets in a big miniature
In The Dollhouse Upson strips the familiar dollhouse of its childlike innocence and transforms it into a web of memory and psychological projection. The starting point is a large-scale reconstruction of a dollhouse that has been inherited from her family for generations—a walk-in model in which Upson herself becomes a figure. Hidden behind a mask, she plays on the interior and thus creates a new dimension in which game and reality, shelter and threat overlap: What once offered refuge becomes the stage of inner conflicts—the architectural metaphor of a life that mixes inside and outside. Upson thus shows how personal experiences enroll in spaces and materials. Their approach is both manic and analytically precise. Layer by layer, she exposes the psychological sediments of the hidden. In this way, the dollhouse becomes a symbol of their practice – an attempt to make the inside visible without solving its mystery.

Larry—anatomy of the lost
From penetrating a strange house to exploring the deserted streets of her homeland, Kaari Upson’s Larry Project is a multi-layered portrait of desire and decay. The starting point is the real and at the same time imagined figure “Larry”, a neighbour from Upson’s childhood, whose empty house she secretly enters, researches and documents. With an almost obsessive, analytical look, she reconstructs a psychological puzzle between reality and fiction from traces and objects. It abolishes the boundary between what is permitted and what is forbidden.

Larry becomes less of a person than an alter ego—a projection screen where the self and the stranger meet. As a result, Upson expands her gaze from the private in Larry’s house to the public in her hometown of San Bernardino, a more run-down city just outside Los Angeles. She focuses her attention on abandoned places and the discarded sofas and mattresses on the side of the road, which she also finds in the surroundings of her studio in Los Angeles. From these remains she forms casts of latex and urethane. Here, the obsessive gaze becomes a social investigation. Upson seems to be asking us what the things we leave behind tell us about ourselves.

The exhibition is realized in cooperation with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and MASI Lugano.