On 23 January 2026, Millesgården will inaugurate the new exhibition series &Milles, created to initiate a dialogue between contemporary artists and Millesgården - donated to the Swedish people by Carl and Olga Milles in 1936. Artists are invited to create site-specific installations based on Millesgården’s unique environment. First to present is Diana Orving, with the exhibition Celestial bodies, where her monumental textile sculptures encounter Carl Milles’s world of mythology, astronomy, and visionary heights.

In January 2026, Millesgården Museum will launch a new exhibition series: &Milles. The initiative places the total work of art of Millesgården, donated to the Swedish people in 1936, in active dialogue with the present. Artists are invited to create site-specific installations in relation to the unique environment: the Artist’s Home where Carl Milles’s monumental sculptures coexist with the paintings by his wife Olga Milles, the sculptures by his sister Ruth Milles, and collections of art and antiquities - where the site itself and its sculpture park can also serve as sources of inspiration.

Through &Milles, the museum aims to create new conversations between past and present, ensuring that Millesgården remains a place for artistic exploration and renewal. The programme is recurring and developed in collaboration with artists active in Sweden.

Diana Orving – Celestial bodies

In Celestial bodies, which includes several site-specific works, Diana Orving’s monumental textile sculptures meet Carl Milles’s world of mythology, astronomy, and visionary heights. The large studio, with Milles sculptures that seem to hover between heaven and earth, becomes a stage for a dialogue across time between materials and expressive forms. Just as Carl Milles allowed his works to rise toward the sky, Orving’s sculptures occupy the space with a lightness that defies gravity. The textiles unfold in layers and billow into organic forms that may call to mind cloudscapes, wind currents, vegetation in motion, or the flight of bird flocks. Here, the cosmic and the corporeal meet: celestial bodies as both stars and symbols of humanity’s longing to transcend its limitations.

The title Celestial bodies connects to Milles’s fascination with astronomy and the symbolic charge of placing art high above, as if on the verge of leaving the earth. In Orving’s work, this perspective takes on a contemporary form: soft, porous textile structures that capture light and movement and hold both weightlessness and physical presence. The exhibition weaves together the heights of myth, the infinity of the universe, and the free movement of birds with the intimate, body-centred quality of textiles. It invites visitors to wander between heaven and earth, between Carl Milles’s bronze and stone and Orving’s silk and linen - a meeting where materials communicate with one another and gravity seems to be momentarily suspended.

“We are proud to inaugurate &Milles with Diana Orving, since her artistic practice unites the bodily and the cosmic in a way that speaks naturally with Carl Milles’s world. Her textile sculptures move between weight and lightness, between earth and sky - just like Milles’s works. Through Orving, we open the series with an artist who both carries the dialogue with history forward and brings something new to this place,” says Sara Källström, Museum Director and CEO of Millesgården Museum.