Four years after her untimely death at age 51, California artist Kaari Upson is being honored with a major retrospective exhibition that showcases her haunting exploration of loss, decay, and the collapse of American ideals. Her work, characterized by disturbing yet seductive installations featuring molded dirty chairs, mattresses, and empty Pepsi cans painted in garish colors, presents what appears to be a materialized psychosis of contemporary American life.
Upson's art tells stories of trauma and decline through an immersive world of dystopia mixed with dark humor. Her first posthumous retrospective is currently on display at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, while Sprüth Magers gallery, which represents her estate, is simultaneously showing a selection of her work in London. These exhibitions reveal an unsettling body of work that deals with bodies and clichés, loss and death in ways that challenge viewers' comfort zones.
Born in 1970 in San Bernardino, a Los Angeles suburb with one of the highest crime rates in the United States and already plagued by devastating wildfires, Upson's personal history deeply influenced her artistic vision. Her mother, who idolized America, drowned her East German origins in Pepsi consumption to the point of self-abandonment and eventually died of cancer. Her father, dressed in cowboy shirts, longed nostalgically for the Wild West. These family obsessions and memories, combined with themes of psychoanalysis and decay, became central to Upson's work when she studied painting at CalArts.
At CalArts, Upson began what would become her most significant work: The Larry Project, a decade-long exploration based on the imagined life of a man she never met but who lived in the house next to her parents' home in the San Fernando Valley. After Larry was arrested and a wildfire made the house accessible, Upson entered and discovered countless photos and notes, along with mattresses and strange objects that revealed the neighbor's obsession with Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Mansion.
This discovery became Upson's starting point for an expansive fictional narrative through which she reconstructed Larry's life, making him a representative figure for fantasies of sex, masculinity, and wealth, as well as themes of disappearance and isolation. Through installations, paintings, performances, and videos, Upson assumed Larry's role and reconstructed his world, creating a one-to-one replica of his house made from thick, buttery-yellow latex that resembled sagging skin. The work powerfully conveyed that the end of the American Dream was approaching, beginning in the former dream factory of Los Angeles, which now produces only trauma from garbage, fires, and homelessness.
By creating this body of work, Upson inherited the legacy of Los Angeles icons Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Ed Kienholz, mixing personal and collective nightmares with a humor that makes the fear emanating from her relentless work almost unbearable. This is particularly evident in her gigantic dollhouse installation made from plywood, props, and 3D film animation, in which she herself appears. The work is an unmistakable reference to the famous collaborative piece by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley from 1992, which transformed Johanna Spyri's novel Heidi into an incestuous hell of installation, performance, and video.
Simultaneously, Upson's work is based on the dollhouse that her mother built for her as a child, just as her mother appears repeatedly throughout her work as a metaphor for the broken American Dream, tenderness and longing, illness and death. "Mother's Legs" is also the title of her forest-like installation of polyurethane forms hanging from the ceiling like severed limbs. Cast from termite-eaten wood from a tree in front of Upson's childhood home, the protruding knee forms come partly from the artist herself and partly from her mother, transforming the forest into a dreamlike ghostly meeting that is both tender and eerie.
In contrast, Upson's father appears only once in her work, possibly as her final piece before her death. In the Louisiana Museum lies a colorfully painted figure in jeans and a checkered cowboy shirt lying face down with hands and feet severed, five ketchup-red plastic bottles stuck like knives in its back. The father becomes a murdered American nightmare, suffocated by his own essence.
Upson's installations also include recreations of Hugh Hefner's cave-like swimming pool, where videos play showing the artist wearing silicone prosthetic giant breasts and engaging in phone sex scenarios. Fleshy, dark-colored reincarnations of tree trunks with protrusions resembling knees dangle as a morbid forest from the ceiling, creating an environment that looks like embodied psychosis.
No other artist of her generation managed to transform this metaphorical language, which countless artists from David Lynch to Ryan Trecartin have explored in Los Angeles, into a visual vocabulary that is far more intimate and vulnerable than that of her predecessors. Yet she connects to their work so masterfully that viewers find themselves captivated by her art, wishing it had not come to an end so soon.
The exhibitions offer visitors a comprehensive look at Upson's ability to create a domestic world full of dystopia and gallows humor, working against time itself. Her posthumous recognition confirms her position as an important voice in contemporary American art, one who fearlessly examined the dark underbelly of American culture and dreams through deeply personal yet universally resonant imagery.
The Kaari Upson retrospective "The Dollhouse" runs until October 26, 2025, at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, while "House to Body Shift" is on display from September 17 to November 1, 2025, at Sprüth Magers in London.
