Anna Thommesen created colours and patterns inspired by nature. Over five decades she wove a series of exceptional abstract tapestries. This spring’s major special exhibition devoted to Anna Thommesen and her life’s work is the first to unfold her practice in full, to explore it from new perspectives, and to position her and her significant role within art history.

The exhibition sheds new light on Anna Thommesen’s lifelong work and presents more than 40 handwoven tapestries alongside the prestigious decorative commissions she created for private homes, art collections and important public spaces such as Roskilde Cathedral and the Landsting Chamber at Christiansborg. Her tapestries were rooted in age-old handweaving techniques and in yarns she dyed herself – for many years using plants she collected in nature. The exhibition also features meticulous pattern drawings, painterly watercolour sketches and original colour samples that offer a unique insight into her artistic process.

Anna Thommesen was self-taught. She began as a painter before fully embracing weaving as her medium in the 1940s – a choice that likely shaped her position somewhere between craft and fine art, making her difficult to categorise. The exhibition offers an insight into her life as a female artist and the independent position she insisted on at a time when strong modernist movements dominated both art and design. She pursued her own personal expression, outside programmes or dogmas, with nature as a central point of reference.

She helped bring the medium of weaving firmly into modern art, and today her works resonate strongly with contemporary art’s renewed interest in textile media. Among the wider public, too, there is a growing fascination with textiles and handcraft. The tactile, the slow and the creative are increasingly embraced as ways to find calm and focus in a busy everyday life.

Anna Thommesen – Weavings has been developed in collaboration with Holstebro Kunstmuseum, where the exhibition will be shown after its presentation at SMK in Copenhagen.