Throughout European art and cultural history, life and death masks – casts taken directly from the face—have been made to preserve the memory of people who were significant to us. These masks stand as both exact testimonies of specific facial features and as sensory, eerie traces of once-living people.
Among the masks in the exhibition are the faces of some of Denmark’s most famous personalities, including Karen Blixen, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Holger Drachmann, and Johannes V. Jensen. Every wrinkle, fold, and line—some even with eyelashes or beard hairs—are captured in the casts, which remain tactile and present.
The exhibition presents the masks alongside a range of paintings, busts, drawings, wax sculptures, and contemporary art that together explore our relationship with the body, life, death, longing, the face, and the portrait.