Houses, furniture, bodies: Kaari Upson transformed the traces of human existence into art that is as fascinating as it is unsettling. With Dollhouse, MASI Lugano is now presenting the first major posthumous retrospective of the American artist.
It all begins with an abandoned house. In the early 2000s, Kaari Upson (1970 – 2021) discovered the vacant property of a man she had known since childhood, not far from her parents’ home in San Bernardino, California. She called him Larry. Upson secretly entered the house and began examining the traces of his life left behind: personal objects, photographs, documents. But instead of finding out who this man really was, she began to reinvent him.
Over the years, a figure emerged from found objects, fantasies and projections, somewhere between reality and fiction. Larry became an alter ego and a projection surface for a feverish investigation oscillating between obsession, role play and transgression. The Larry Project, on which she worked from 2005 to 2012, became one of the central bodies of work in her oeuvre. Drawings, videos, sculptures and installations revolve around a question that reaches far beyond the story of an unknown man: What do the things we leave behind reveal about us?
The skin of things
This question would accompany Upson throughout her entire career. Born in a district of Los Angeles with one of the highest crime rates in the United States, the artist developed an unmistakable visual language in which the familiar repeatedly tips into the uncanny. Mattresses, sofas, doors or body parts are cast, multiplied and deformed. The inside is turned outwards; surfaces preserve imprints and traces of use. Discarded furniture that she found on the streets of Los Angeles also flowed into her work. From their imprints, she created sculptures that connect personal stories with social questions. The seemingly banal takes on a psychological dimension — and at times something almost bodily. Upson herself spoke of her fascination with the skin of things.
When the dollhouse grows
Few motifs run through Upson’s work as consistently as the house. It promises protection and security, but can just as easily become a place of secrets, family role models and repressed memories. This ambivalence becomes particularly powerful in the monumental installation THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE. This time, the starting point is not a stranger’s property, but her mother’s dollhouse. Passed down through generations, it is enlarged by the artist on a dramatically expanded scale into a walk-in space. What appears familiar and almost harmless in miniature suddenly becomes oppressive. The boundaries between reality and imagination, childhood and the adult world, begin to dissolve.
In a peculiar way, this closes a circle. At the beginning, the American artist enters the house of a stranger and tries to imagine a life from what he left behind. Years later, she enlarges a house from her own family history to such an extent that she herself can fit inside.
Traces of an existence
With Kaari Upson. Dollhouse – A Retrospective, MASI Lugano traces the development of this extraordinary body of work. The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Kunsthalle Mannheim and is structured in five chapters. Alongside works related to The Larry Project and THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, which was shown in 2019 as part of the 58th Venice Biennale, the exhibition also presents the expansive work Mother’s Legs and the artist’s final series, the Foot Face Paintings.
Kaari Upson is one of the most haunting and distinctive artistic voices of her generation. She doesn’t tell closed narratives, but leaves behind fragments and traces from which viewers must assemble their own reality. In her work, houses are never just houses, and objects are never simply things. They possess a memory — sometimes they tell us more about ourselves than we might like.
6 September 2026 to 10 January 2027
Kaari Upson. Dollhouse – A Retrospective
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