COPENHAGEN.- Nivaagaard’s Painting Collection is closing 2025 on a high note. With more than 82,000 visitors, the museum has recorded the second-highest attendance in its history, confirming a year marked by strong public interest, ambitious exhibitions, and significant additions to the permanent collection.

The year opened at full speed with the final months of WETLAND – Michael Kvium, which became the museum’s second most visited exhibition ever, surpassed only by the record-breaking William Morris exhibition in 2019. January also saw the opening of Arteron Colony in Hornbæk, where visitors encountered works by contemporary artists known from the popular DR television series, including Apolonia Sokol, Noah Umur Kanber, Kasper Eistrup, Jeannette Ehlers, Nina Saunders, and Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen—bringing contemporary art directly into the North Zealand landscape.

Spring and summer drew large audiences to The Bloomsbury Group: The Art of Living, a vibrant sequel to the Morris exhibition. Through immersive design and richly colored interiors, the exhibition invited visitors into the world of early 20th-century British artists, writers, and thinkers who reshaped ideas of art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life. At the same time, Nivaagaard’s park became a living exhibition space, where Ann Lislegaard’s curated soundscape of endangered bird calls resonated with the park’s own wildlife, while The Reserve for Endangered Words grew with newly invented words planted by 200 schoolchildren.

Late summer brought a quieter but deeply resonant exhibition: Janus la Cour. Silence. The overlooked Danish painter’s meditative landscapes—created in deliberate resistance to industrial modernity—proved strikingly relevant to contemporary audiences. The exhibition remains on view until January 4, 2026.

Beyond exhibitions, 2025 was also a landmark year for the museum’s collection. Significant acquisitions by female artists expanded Nivaagaard’s holdings in a way that attracted international attention. Works by Catharina Ykens II and Artemisia Gentileschi, including Susanna and the Elders, brought the museum’s pre-1700 collection of works by women artists to five—an achievement highlighted by The Sunday Times, which noted that Nivaagaard now surpasses the Louvre and stands alongside the Prado and the National Gallery in this field.

Looking ahead to 2026

Nivaagaard’s Painting Collection enters 2026 with three major exhibitions that continue its focus on art, nature, and overlooked histories.

The Time of the Forest
17 January – 19 April 2026

Against the backdrop of Denmark’s ambitious green transition, this exhibition explores what it means to become a forest nation once again. Through contemporary art and historical works, it reflects on humanity’s shifting relationship with forests—once a place of myth and danger, later cleared for agriculture, and now returning as a vital ecological and cultural resource.

Richard Winther: 100 Years
1 May – 13 September 2026

Marking the centenary of Richard Winther’s birth, this exhibition presents the full scope of an artist who constantly experimented across painting, photography, sculpture, film, music, and literature. Winther lived and worked in Nivå for more than two decades, and the exhibition also includes works from his personal collection—by artists such as Giacometti, Picasso, Max Ernst, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba—staged as a total installation in collaboration with contemporary artist Mie Mørkeberg.

Christine Swane: A Diverse One
24 September 2026 – 31 January 2027

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Christine Swane’s birth, this is the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date. Painter, ceramicist, and artisan, Swane developed a poetic and experimental visual language rooted in close observation of everyday life, nature, and domestic spaces. The exhibition highlights her restless curiosity and wide-ranging practice, from painting and ceramics to textiles and large-scale mosaic work.

With strong visitor numbers, growing international recognition, and a forward-looking exhibition program, Nivaagaard’s Painting Collection enters 2026 as a museum deeply engaged with both history and the urgent questions of the present.