SPHERICAL – Kirsten Klein 80 years

The exhibition SFÆRISK (Spherical) marks the photographer Kirsten Klein’s 80th birthday. With more than 150 works, it’s the most comprehensive retrospective of her long artistic career to date. Kirsten Klein (b. 1945, Stockholm) is regarded as one of Denmark’s most significant living photographic artists.

She is known especially for her technically singular black-and-white landscape photography, and her attentive capture of weather phenomena such as the northern lights, black sun, tides and moonlight. These are poetic and often melancholic depictions of nature, predominantly from the areas around Mors where she lives and works.

Looking through Kirsten Klein’s extensive archive, which has been done in recent years prior to the exhibition, however, reveals several lesser known but highly relevant aspects of her long-standing production. The culturally diverse and more anthropologically oriented motifs from countless trips around the world are first and foremost depictions of people. Here we get a vivid impression of everyday life in a series of images from the Yucatan Peninsula, Ireland, Guinea-Bissau, Karpathos and Sámiland. This contributes a strand of global aesthetics to her oeuvre that goes far beyond the familiar domestic landscapes.

The exhibition includes portraits of rural and youth culture on the Limfjord island of Mors, which Kirsten Klein moved to in 1976, where she became involved in environmental activist organisations and communal living and working collectives. There are also images of the starling flocks in the marshlands of Tønder, whose swirling movements across the sky reflect the great rhythm of nature and the eternal cycle of life. As well as compositions that focus on everyday objects which, however, are given something mysterious through dramatic contrast effects. Kirsten Klein’s photographs often balance between abstraction and recognisability.

Finally, the exhibition features a series of performative photographs in which Kirsten Klein stages herself as a physically sensing human presence immersed in atmospheric images of terrain. Through her use of the camera obscura technique, figures dissolve into almost floating forms with which Kirsten Klein registers the body’s deep connection with the natural surroundings.

Kirsten Klein’s interest in photography began at the age of 11, and she realised early on that she wanted to work artistically with photography. And that life should be lived in harmony with nature. The holistic view of nature and life has influenced Kirsten Klein throughout her life, both privately and in her artistic practice. The exhibition aims to show how highly relevant and broad-ranging Kirsten Klein’s artistry really is. And at the same time demonstrate that in many ways she has been ahead of her time, in terms of her desire for photographic experimentation and her uncompromising choice to live in full accordance with her ideals. Here we find the source of Kirsten Klein’s unique ability to evoke and preserve nature and people as part of a larger common sphere and its species-rich fabric.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with graphic design by Spine Studio and article contributions by the exhibition curators, art historian Line Kjær and director of Holstebro Kunstmuseum Anders Gaardboe Jensen. It also includes texts by associate professor of art history with a specialisation in photography at the University of Copenhagen Rune Gade, poet, sound and performance artist Cia Rinne, and cultural geographer and author Emmy Laura Pérez Fjalland. The catalogue will be published by Holstebro Kunstmuseums Forlag in the spring of 2026.

The exhibition SPHERICAL – Kirsten Klein 80 years is produced in close collaboration with Munkeruphus, which showed the exhibition from August 24 to November 16, 2025.

The exhibition is supported by