OPENING | Anna Thommesen – Weavings

Anna Thommesen’s life's work is brought into the light in the largest exhibition about the artist to date. The critically acclaimed Anna Thommesen – Weavings has now traveled from the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen to Holstebro Kunstmuseum.

The exhibition sheds new light on Anna Thommesen’s lifelong work and presents more than 40 handwoven tapestries alongside the prestigious decorative commissions she created for private homes, art collections and important public spaces such as Roskilde Cathedral and the Landsting Chamber at Christiansborg. Her tapestries were rooted in age-old handweaving techniques and in yarns she dyed herself – for many years using plants she collected in nature. The exhibition also features meticulous pattern drawings, painterly watercolour sketches and original colour samples that offer a unique insight into her artistic process.

Anna Thommesen was self-taught. She began as a painter before fully embracing weaving as her medium in the 1940s – a choice that likely shaped her position somewhere between craft and fine art, making her difficult to categorise. The exhibition offers an insight into her life as a female artist and the independent position she insisted on at a time when strong modernist movements dominated both art and design. She pursued her own personal expression, outside programmes or dogmas, with nature as a central point of reference.

She helped bring the medium of weaving firmly into modern art, and today her works resonate strongly with contemporary art’s renewed interest in textile media. Among the wider public, too, there is a growing fascination with textiles and handcraft. The tactile, the slow and the creative are increasingly embraced as ways to find calm and focus in a busy everyday life.

Anna Thommesen – Weavings has been developed in collaboration with the National Gallery of Denmark, where it was shown Febraury 7 - August 16, 2026.