Design for a large exhibition about national icon Marie Krøyer at Skagens Museum and The Hirschsprung Collection.

The prevailing narrative around the turn-of-the-century artist has been that “what a pity it was that she quit painting”. And while she did quit painting, she didn’t quit creating.

Instead Marie Krøyer focused on other crafts and became, among other things, an interior designer before there even was such a term. The exhibition shines a light on exactly that by showcasing Krøyer’s furniture and interior design skills alongside her drawings.

To that end we had three exquisitely detailed architectural models built of three of Marie Krøyer’s own homes, by a team of students from Aarhus School of Architecture.

Drawing inspiration from Marie Krøyer’s signature cloverleaf motif we designed two wallpaper patterns for the exhibition. In the end, only one of them was used, hand-painted by Copenhagen Signs for the show at Hirschsprung.

The two locations of the exhibition, Skagen and Hirschsprung, had very different exhibition spaces at their disposal – one is a turn-of-the-century gallery (Hirschsprung), whereas the other is a contemporary white-cube space (Skagen). This meant that we had to come up with two very different spatial concepts for the two versions of the show.

At Skagen we wanted to do a domestic, rooms-en-suite situation, and create an intimacy which we felt was lacking in the space and would fit the theme and the artworks very well.

We designed a wall installation with door openings arranged to create a feeling of looking from one space through another and in to a room further away.

At Hirschsprung we flipped the idea on its head by painting the spaces white, thereby creating more of a clean gallery space in these otherwise richly detailed museum rooms.

We also designed cloverleaf stools that ended up not being built.

All visualizations are from the Skagen version of the show.

All photos from Hirschsprung by David Stjernholm.