Vilhelm Hammershøi: With the Future as Horizon

Preview: written before the show opened

A woman leans out of a window onto a courtyard walkway in Christianshavn, lit, in the museum's words, with "almost projector-like brilliance". Courtyard Interior at Strandgade 30 (1905) is one of the few times Hammershøi painted the outside of the building he lived in. Ordrupgaard bought it in 2026 from a former US ambassador's collection, and it will be a central work here.

More than 70 works from Denmark and abroad, interiors, portraits and landscapes, hang with other artists, Piet Mondrian among them. The question is whether his light, line and repetition point forward to twentieth-century modernism. The museum says his rooms leave you at home and shut out at once: you look in from a distance. In 1909 Hammershøi wrote that modern people "ought to live in modern, contemporary dwellings", an odd line from the painter of all those quiet grey rooms.

It runs from 3 February to 23 May 2027. On Wednesdays it's open until 19:00, and free for students and under-27s from 16:00.