A Dialogue Across Generations: Hannah Heilmann and Jytte Rex

Editorial

04.02.2026

Hannah Heilmann, 'Minecraft Mom'. Courtesy of Wilson Saplana Gallery.

Time goes by… and for Market Art Fair’s 20th anniversary, Copenhagen-based Wilson Saplana Gallery presents a duo-presentation with Danish artists Hannah Heilmann and Jytte Rex, curated around just that – time.

When seen together, the works of Heilmann and Rex reveal time as a cyclical and fragmented concept, deeply connected to resilience and imagination. With a background as an art historian, Heilmann’s artistry comes through a cross-media practice merging painting, poems, and interactive installations into poetic narratives on consumerism. Often drawing on fashion history as well as material fetish, her works combine found objects with simple paintings and folklore-inspired figures.

The works point to the dreamy and disturbing elements of life, and she often challenges not only societal understandings but also traditional exhibition formats. She places the role of the artist and the status of the artwork at stake, with works that often take on the character of props, costumes, or elements requiring social interaction.

Hannah Heilmann. Photo by Luna Stage.
Hannah Heilmann, 'Time keeping of the weirdziligentsia'. Courtesy of Wilson Saplana Gallery.

In Wilson Saplana’s presentation at Market Art Fair 2026, the works of Hannah Heilmann are put in conversation with Jytte Rex’s expressive, feminist, and genre-defying artistic practice, which spans decades. Despite differences in age, and mostly in practice, both Heilmann and Rex share a belief that the personal is political. Wilson Saplana brings their aesthetic kinship into focus as a fitting contribution to Market Art Fair’s 20th anniversary, celebrating the fair’s commitment to artistic diversity while opening new perspectives across generations and artistic practices.

In Jytte Rex’s work, images often reappear in multiple collages and settings, shifting their narrative and agency. Throughout her extensive career she has worked across various media – performance, video, sculpture, photography – and her practice maintains an avant-gardist, poetic sensibility, with stories often anchored in feminist commitment.

Jytte Rex, 'My Tender Wife'. Photo by David Stjernholm.

Her feminist perspective developed during her years at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1970s, placing her at the forefront of the Scandinavian feminist arts movement. For decades she focused primarily on an international career as a film director, and only in recent years have museums worldwide rediscovered her significant feminist artistic practice as she returned to working less with film.

Jytte Rex, 'My Tender Wife'. Photo by David Stjernholm.
Jytte Rex, 'My Tender Wife'. Photo by David Stjernholm.
Jytte Rex

Rex’s approach can be seen as an expanded form of painting. Even when she works with film, photography, or writing, her focus remains on colour, form, light and surface, allowing these elements to move between mediums without losing their intensity.

The presentation unfolds as a dialogue across generations: Heilmann’s work is rooted in the present, transforming the structures of daily life – its routines, labour, and gestures of care – into improvised, feminist “kitchen-table art.” Rex’s poetic and politically engaged practice moves fluidly between past and future, weaving together the personal and the collective.