Exhibitions 1988 – 2024

Since 1987, Magasin III has supported artistic activity through solo and thematic group exhibitions of locally and internationally established artists. The program has given exhibiting artists the opportunity to develop their practice and produce new works, and has allowed reflections on the collection as well as revisits of artists previously shown at Magasin III.

Magasin III has nurtured artistic visions since it embraced new productions with the very first exhibitions. Transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary, to give perspective to the otherwise invisible, lies at the heart of artistic engagement with our world. To open up to creative possibilities is to set trust in the artist and the artistic expression, and most of all the underlying thought and intention.

Magasin III has over the decades cultivated its own tonality of curating. It is the artist’s work that can be challenging, sublime, political, or take any other stance towards and for a viewer. The work can and has to be able to speak for itself. No interpretation effort that stands outside the work, be it on a label besides it, brochures, books, videos, can overtake the work in its primacy of speaking to its audience.

Engaging with an artistic practice at Magasin III has always been with a strong focus on what an artist is interested in right then and there, rather than retrospective formats. Frequently, this has led artists to embrace change, to take a new direction at Magasin III, that in turn influences their course of production going forward. Producing and collecting has often gone hand in hand. The offer to acquire large scale or major new work, or something else from their production, has allowed artists to delve into the unknown without pressure, but with assurance.

The concept of revisits took shape under time at Magasin III, eventually becoming something of a leitmotiv. It is one that has grown organically from the museum’s own model of productions and presentations. Works specifically created for exhibitions at Magasin III have become markers of their time when preserved in the collection. They bring together important aspects of artistic thinking and convey partial answers to eternal questions. Revisiting works and inviting artists back over time keeps the wheel of artistic creation spinning, reevaluating previous answers, and adding new insights to them. Open-ended creative paths never yield a prescribed, or even predicted result. Trusting means taking risks, but ever so often leading to extraordinary artistic expressions.