Anna Munk
In the Garden Room Anna Munk presents a new suite of door pieces and still lifes in dialogue with portraits by painter to the Danish Royal Court, Carl Gustaf Pilo (SE, 1711–93). Depicting the palace’s former residents adorned with jewels and drapery, Pilo performs and reinforces his subjects’ status. Drawing on his overripe palette of browns, pinks and greens, Munk reimagines classical motifs of fruit and clouds as faded, decaying forms.
Munk’s paintings approach art history as a fluid framework, continually reshaped through reproduction, translation, and the gradual erosion of time. The expressive clouds recurring across her door pieces act as a foil to their Rococo counterparts in the adjacent room. Rather than extending their flamboyant narrative, Munk turns towards abstraction. The clouds’ textured forms echo the soft textiles animating Pilo’s portraits, an ephemeral counterpoint to his portrayals of inherited power.
Shifting and dissolving before the eye, Munk’s paintings draw on the vanitas tradition to consider how time alters our experience of an artwork. Combining oil paint with contemporary cosmetics such as foundation, lip gloss, eyeshadow, and highlighter, the artist invites parallels between efforts to maintain physical appearance and the preservation and restoration of historical artefacts. Raising questions of authenticity and artifice, Munk points to the conditions and contingencies that shape our under- standing of art history.
Photos: David Stjernholm
“The works in fact seem to evaporate as we watch them—a sentiment underscored by a subtle odour of powder room or damp, alluding to musty museum storage. In Munk’s paintings solidity is over; changing, aging, dissolution are imminent.”
— Rhea Dall, Director and Chief Curator, O—Overgaden, December 2025
Artist Bio
Anna Munk (b. 1994, Copenhagen)
Anna Munk lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. Her 2025 solo exhibition at O-Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, concluded her participation in INTRO 2025, a one-year collaborative programme supported by the Louis-Hansen Foundation. Recent exhibitions include P21, Seoul (2025); Atelier W Pantin, Paris (2024) and Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2023).