HAGD Contemporary: Michael Kærgaard and the Logic of Monsters
Michael Kærgaard - Mother of Many
Exhibition Preview
HAGD Contemporary, Aalborg
Curated by Rasmus Peter Fischer
February 7–28, 2026
Mother of Many marks Michael Kærgaard’s most extensive presentation to date, unfolding as a dense constellation of glazed stoneware figures across the gallery walls. Rather than staging a linear narrative, the exhibition builds an atmosphere. Objects appear as presences, clustered yet singular, oscillating between attraction and unease. The room reads less like a display and more like a terrain populated by characters that refuse to settle into fixed roles.
Kærgaard’s sculptures operate through tension. Their surfaces are rough, porous, sometimes scarred, interrupted by holes, protrusions, and spikes tipped with gold. These details are not decorative accents but pressure points. They sharpen the figures’ expressions and pull them out of the familiar register of ceramics toward something closer to mythic artefacts or speculative relics. Humor and darkness coexist, not as contrast but as parallel forces.
Michael Kærgaard, Mother of Many (Details of stoneware sculpture), curated by Rasmus Peter Fischer. Detail view of glazed stoneware sculpture, where rough surfaces, cavities, and gold accents sharpen the figure’s presence. Image credit by Niklas Lundaard Svendsen. HAGD Contemporary
Working as a self-taught ceramic artist, Kærgaard has developed his own material language through long experimentation with clay and glazes. In Mother of Many, this process becomes visible as a system rather than a backdrop.
Each figure feels like a variation within a larger organism, suggesting multiplicity, inheritance, and repetition without hierarchy. Monsters, here, are not exceptions. They are conditions.
Hagd Contemporary - Curated by Rasmus Peter Fischer. Installation view from Mother of Many by Michael Kærgaard, showing a vertical stoneware sculpture on a pedestal alongside wall-mounted ceramic figures. Image credit by Niklas Lundaard Svendsen. HAGD Contemporary
The exhibition holds its ground by resisting explanation. It does not ask to be decoded or softened. Instead, it invites viewers to stay with the ambiguity and recognize fragments of themselves in forms that are at once strange, tender, and uncompromising.
Info
Artist: Michael Kærgaard
Exhibition: Mother of Many
Venue: HAGD Contemporary, Aalborg
Dates: February 7–28, 2026
Gallery Assistent: Veronika Botin
Image credit: Niklas Lundaard Svendsen
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