Moderna Museet explores the return to figurative painting among a new generation of artists, asking: Which visual and symbolic vocabularies are artists developing in painting today? Mythology, religion and history have been the historical focus of painting, but in the 21st century, artists are equally inspired by mysticism, fashion, astrology, cinema, social media or science fiction in developing their symbolic language. The audience will encounter nearly twenty-five newly commissioned paintings, as well as a number of existing works.
The group exhibition House of Nisaba: New Stories of Painting offers a deep dive into contemporary painting. The exhibition borrows its name from the Mesopotamian goddess Nisaba, initially the protector of grain and accounting, but, with the invention of writing, she also became the goddess of the scribe, of storytelling finding material form. Now, she is evoked once again – by the curator Hendrik Folkerts – as the divine patron of this house of painters.
Meanings in Contemporary Painting
Hendrik Folkerts began working on the exhibition by asking the following questions: What does painting look like and mean in the world today, as knowledge transforms, information accelerates and societies splinter? What new modes of storytelling are painters developing today?
He says: “The artists in “House of Nisaba”, most of whom are born in the 1980s and 1990s, do not belong to any movement, but rather, they share a sensibility, towards figuration, towards symbolism, towards creating new stories in the information and technological age”.
New Allegories
In painting, allegory is a way of creating images or figures that signify something beyond their literal meaning – for example, a human skull that in historical still life painting symbolised the transience of life.
In previous centuries, painters often worked within a shared iconography: they created symbols whose meaning was agreed upon and generally known. Today, this has changed, as an artist creates a system of meaning within their own practice. That shared iconography has made way for a more individualised structure of references: citations and appropriations that reflect today’s brad circulation and fragmentation of information distribution. The feed matters, shaping the individualised perception of the world.
The Exhibition’s Provisional Architecture
Devised by the design and architecture studio Formafantasma, the exhibition’s architecture suggests this House as provisional and always in the making, reflecting the new life of painting in the 21st century. To fully shape Nisaba’s house, the exhibition design plays with the architectural history of painting in temples, churches, cathedrals and mosques, by including aspects of sacred architecture.
Partciping artists:
Soufiane Ababri
Michael Armitage
Felipe Baeza
Kevin Beasley
Cornel Brudascu
Alex Červený
Leidy Churchman
Hamishi Farah
Martin Gustavsson
Gordon Hookey
Hortensia Mi Kafchin
Sanya Kantarovsky
Melanie Kitti
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Jill Mulleady
Wangechi Mutu
Naudline Pierre
Mohammed Sami
Cinga Samson
Agnes Scherer
Selma Selman
Agata Słowak
Mikołaj Sobczak
Mounira Al Solh
Abdellah Taïa
Salman Toorn
Kevin Quashie
Evelyn T. Wang
Press release from Moderna Museet
Image: Installation view from House of Nisaba: New Stories of Painting at Moderna Museet, 2026. Photography by My Matson/Moderna Museet
