Ovartaci

Ovartaci was a colorful and complex person – self‑taught artist, poet, and engineer. An adventurer and a dreamer. Intellectual, psychiatric patient, and trained house painter. She was a winter bather, a yogi, and a lover of nature. She believed in Buddhism, animism, and reincarnation, drawing inspiration from the many past lives she felt she had lived.

Her life’s work is inseparable from her own radical life story, which also includes a nervous breakdown in Argentina, a self-performed gender amputation, and an unfulfilled dream of living life as a woman. Altogether, she lived for 56 years as a patient at psychiatric hospitals, primarily in Risskov, north of Aarhus.

The exhibition was first shown at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam in the spring of 2023 under the title Becoming Ovartaci.

In collaboration with Kunstmuseum Brandts and Museum Ovartaci in Aarhus, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art now presents the exhibition to a Danish audience.

The exhibition is accompanied by a research‑based catalogue published in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Brandts.