For its most ambitious exhibition to date, Thorvaldsens Museum spotlights Bharti Kher, the internationally acclaimed sculptor known for dissecting and reimagining ideas of body, gender, identity, and culture. Her show, Mythologies, pulls viewers into a world where the personal and collective collide, using sculpture as a way to explore memory, transformation, and the essence of lived experience.
Kher’s practice is rooted in the physicality of the body — not just as form, but as a symbolic vessel that carries history, intimacy, and identity. She works with casts in diverse materials, turning them into objects that feel simultaneously familiar and otherworldly. The process echoes ancient traditions, like the Egyptian use of plaster death masks, but here, the casts hold new layers of meaning, merging presence, absence, and the possibility of renewal.
Mythology underpins much of Kher’s work, particularly through inspiration drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the shape-shifting figures of Greco-Roman tales. Identity, in her hands, is never fixed; it’s fluid, in flux, constantly breaking down and rebuilding. By pulling references from different cultural and geographical sources, she builds a sculptural language that reflects the restless, interconnected state of the contemporary world.
The result is a body of work that feels both deeply intimate and expansively universal — a reminder that, like her sculptures, we are all in a process of perpetual transformation. Mythologies marks Kher’s first solo exhibition in Denmark, bringing her nearly three decades of groundbreaking work into dialogue with Nordic audiences.
The exhibition will run from, 22.8.2025 – 8.3.2026, at Thorvaldsen’s Museum.
