Moderna Museet Collection

A Room of One’s Own

Welcome to a room for works rooted in the history of feminism and female artists. In this gallery, which has taken its name from Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking essay from 1929, you will almost exclusively find works by Swedish female 20th-century artists such as Siri Derkert, Anna Riwkin, Hilma af Klint and Sigrid Hjertén. There are contemporary works as well by Kajsa Dahlberg and Charlotte Johannesson as well.

Read the introduction to the room: A Room of One’s Own

Realism and Pure-Hearted Poetry

100 years ago, the world had experienced rapid and revolutionary social change. Industrialisation, new technologies, urbanisation, wars and a collapse of the stock exchange impacted on living patterns and everyday conditions. Certain aspects of existence became more complex.

Several artists felt a need to see and preserve in their art the simplicity that was disappearing. They painted the scenes around them, or even their own lives, to hold on to an image of something good and peaceful.

Read the introductions to the rooms: Spheres of Abstraction & Realism and Pure-Hearted Poetry

New Ways of Seeing & Travels in Time and Space

Join us in an exploration of the early 1900s. In the room titled “Travels in Time and Space”, you will encounter photography and painting by artists who experimented with new shapes, colours, and motifs after experiencing art in Alger, Tangier, Cairo, and Constantinople.

In the next room, “New Ways of Seeing”, photography is presented in a dialogue with radical, Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Read the texts found in the rooms.

Read the introductions to the rooms: New Ways of Seeing & Travels in Time and Space

Strangely Familiar

What psychoanalysis calls das Unheimliche is literally the ”unhomely”, or in English the uncanny. To thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva, the uncanny addresses what is strangely familiar: when what is well known and safe turns into something deeply ambiguous that provokes fear and disgust.

Read the introduction to the room ”Strangely Familiar”, and three other galleries: Four galleries of contemporary art

Spheres of Abstraction

This room presents a few of the artists who, in different places and with different intentions, developed an abstract formal imagery in the first decades of the 20th century. Some saw geometric shapes as a way of liberating art from its task of depicting the world. Others chose abstraction to try to portray a spiritual universe, or to render the impressions of movement and speed that appeared in modern cities.

Read the introductions to the rooms: Spheres of Abstraction & Realism and Pure-Hearted Poetry