Anna Munk
Anna Munk activates the palace’s ground floor in conversation with historical portraiture, reimagining the Garden Room’s rococo door-pieces.
Themes of regeneration and decay resurface in a new suite of door-pieces by Anna Munk for the palace Garden Room. This new commission is made in response to a display of eighteenth-century portraits by painter to the Danish Royal Court, Carl Gustaf Pilo. Depicting Valdemars Slot’s former residents adorned with drapery, feathers and ribbons, the works perform wealth and status.
Munk draws from their yellowed varnish an overripe palette of greens, browns, and rosy pink. Lightly perfumed with contemporary materials, her pigment incorporates eye shadow, highlighter, lip gloss, and foundation. Presenting an abstract vanitas, Munk invites parallels between painterly attempts to capture and preserve beauty and the economy of appearance associated with ‘selfies’ today.
“The works in fact seem to evaporate as we watch them—a sentiment underscored by a subtle odor 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)
Munk lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. Her solo exhibition at O—Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2025) marked the culmination of her participation in INTRO 2025, a one-year collaborative programme supported by Louis-Hansen Foundation. Recent exhibitions include P21, Seoul (2025); Atelier W Pantin, Paris (2024); Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2023); Tørreloft AGA Works, Copenhagen (2022); Møstings, Frederiksberg (2022); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022).