Exhibitions
Upcoming
Season Two
23 May – 19 September ‘26
Valdemars Slot reopens on Saturday 23 May as a destination for contemporary art, bringing international artists into dialogue with its royal history and landscape. Season Two invites visitors to rediscover the site as a space for creativity and interpretation. A programme of new site-specific exhibitions takes place alongside centuries-old commissions and returning installations. Across two residencies, visiting performers and local collaborators develop an ambitious programme of live events that animates the palace and grounds.
Artists include William Kentridge (SA), Bronwyn Lace (SA), Sarah Lucas (GB), Pernille With Madsen (DK), Anna Munk (DK), Giuseppe Penone (IT), and The Centre for the Less Good Idea (SA).
William Kentridge
The Palace, Entrance Hall & Attic
William Kentridge is renowned for his expansive practice, spanning media from drawing and weaving to film, animation and opera. Rooted in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, his work questions established narratives and resists certainty. A sequence of installations guides visitors through the palace, in dialogue with the seventeenth-century site. Incorporating maps and records from Valdemars Slot’s archives, Kentridge reframes its history as partial, shifting, and open to interpretation.
Bronwyn Lace
The Corn Barn
Live performance interacts with video installation in an exhibition by Bronwyn Lace that explores themes of mortality, mourning, and transition. Animating the church-like vaults, Feast or Famine evokes the legacy of apartheid, as Southern African carrion beetles consume the body of a European Barn Owl. The film becomes the stage for a full cast of performers in May and August, whose activations explore the acts of interpretation and ritual through which history is reshaped and retold.
The Centre for the Less Good Idea
The Palace & Grounds
Season Two immerses visitors in the creative world of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, co-founded by artists William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace in Johannesburg in 2016. A significant programme of artist residencies and site-specific installations culminates in two weekends of performance, activating the palace and grounds in May and August 2026.
Bronwyn Lace, Neo Muyanga, and three South African performers collaborate with local artists to animate Valdemars Slot as a living site for creativity and cultural exchange. Guided by two periods of archival research, the programme brings music and choreography rooted in Africa into conversation with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions created and played at the palace.
Sarah Lucas
The Tea Pavilion
Sarah Lucas’ first solo exhibition in Denmark presents a group of five sculptures that introduce her bold yet tender exploration of gender and sexuality. Drawing on traditions of the female nude, Lucas parodies art historical precedent whilst exposing the casual misogyny embedded in mainstream culture. Situated in the iconic Tea Pavilion, her figures transform a space designed for polite ritual into a fantastical realm beyond the constraints of social convention.
Pernille With Madsen
The Riding Hall
Pernille With Madsen revisits her installation for Season One, extending her dreamlike visual language to envelop the vast Riding Hall. Retaining traces of its past as both a performance space and grain store, the hall becomes a frame through which to explore how history is constructed and understood. A doorway, sealed with a gold plate, distils the exhibition’s seductive pull: With Madsen conjures an imaginary past, only to expose the artifice that lures us in.
Anna Munk
The Palace, Garden Room
Anna Munk presents new work in dialogue with a group of portraits by Carl Gustaf Pilo (SE, 1711–93), which depict Valdemars Slot’s former residents as emblems of wealth and power. Drawing her palette directly from Pilo, Munk’s ephemeral images of fruit and clouds recast these works through the language of vanitas. By combining oil paint with contemporary cosmetics, Munk invites parallels between attempts to preserve our physical appearance and the broader cultural drive to restore or stabilise historical artefacts.
Giuseppe Penone
The Palace, Curated by Per Jonas Storsve
Giuseppe Penone’s first solo exhibition in Denmark brings together major early sculptures, photographs, and archival materials, providing rare insight into his poetic visual language. A leading proponent of Arte Povera, Penone’s five-decade-long practice explores the relationship between humans and nature. By bringing leaves and trees inside the palace, the Italian artist inverts its grandeur with radical humility, restoring wonder to our experience of the natural world.
Previous
Season One
24 May – 14 September ‘25
Valdemars Slot opened in 2025 as a new venue for interdisciplinary contemporary art, with a dynamic programme of exhibitions and events taking place from May to September each year. By inviting contemporary artists to create site-responsive works, an age-old tradition of artistic commissions returned to VS, bringing new life to the Estate
A presentation of significant paintings by Carl Gustaf Pilo (SE, 1711–93) and Jens Juel (DK, 1745–1802) made specially for the palace took place alongside site-specific installations by international contemporary artists including Rong Bao (CN), Jiří Georg Dokoupil (CZ), Hanne Lippard (NO), and Pernille With Madsen (DK).
Jiří Georg Dokoupil
The Palace Entrance Hall, First Floor & Chapel
Czech-German artist Jiří Georg Dokoupil’s iconic Soap-Bubble Paintings and new glass sculptures erupt inside the palace’s first floor and Chapel. Toying with the domestic setting, his sculptural furniture welcomes visitors to the Entrance Hall with an invitation to pose and become part of the spectacle.
Pernille With Madsen
The Riding Hall
Pernille With Madsen leads visitors on a dizzying journey through the Riding Hall’s vast architecture in a three-part installation. Bending our bodies to glimpse and gaze, the Danish artist presents an archeological dig of endless proportions, a film straddling two and three dimensions, and sculptures in such miniature detail as to be lost to the naked eye.
Hanne Lippard
The Corn Barn & Entrance Tunnel
Hanne Lippard transforms Valdemars Slot’s entrance tunnel into a vast windpipe with a resounding hiccup. In the palace grounds the vaulted barn becomes a soundscape evoking centuries of use. Using speech as her raw material, the Norwegian artist invites visitors to meditate on their experience of architectural spaces and the ways that social discourse shapes our surroundings.
Rong Bao
The Tea Pavilion
An anemone, octopus, blow up nipple or cervix, Rong Bao’s The New Pontiff, 2025 combines childlike exuberance with witty socio-political critique. In conversation with the Tea Pavilion’s formal architecture, Bao invites viewers to consider: “Who or what is the new authority? In a world characterised by fluidity, fragility, and uncertainty, what have we left to believe in?”.