Nana RHB: PAPPWELT I Location: Helborg Museum, Hurup Thy, Denmark I Dates: 12.09.2026 - 31.10.2026 I Photos: Morten Vaupell

PAPPWELT begins with something familiar that we rarely notice in everyday life: cardboard boxes and printed packaging.

Packaging is designed to protect, transport, and present products, but it often loses its purpose as soon as the product is unpacked. For Nana RHB, this short-lived material becomes the starting point for something new.

The cardboard box can be seen as one of the defining geometric forms of our time – an everyday cube associated with commerce, online shopping, and the global movement of goods. When cut open, the three-dimensional container becomes a flat surface from which new images can emerge.

Cardboard becomes material, colour, form, and narrative. Logos, letters, product images, and industrial colours are not hidden but actively incorporated into the compositions. The existing visual language of packaging becomes a palette that the artist transforms.

From a distance, the fragments come together to form people, flowers, interiors, and abstract shapes. Up close, these images dissolve, revealing the cardboard's previous life. The viewer's gaze moves between the whole and its details, between recognition and transformation.

The works also engage with art history through figures such as Venus and Ophelia, traditional genres such as still life and portraiture, and iconic works such as Malevich's Black Square. These references reappear in a contemporary material, where they encounter the visual language of supermarkets, advertising, and consumer culture.

The human figure often stands at the centre of this encounter – clearly visible, fragmented, concealed, or almost absorbed by its surroundings. In the sculptures, this relationship becomes even more physical as cardboard boxes merge with the human body, becoming heads, masks, containers, or architectural structures.

The exhibition moves between figuration and abstraction, between flat surfaces and three-dimensional objects, between order and accumulation. PAPPWELT is therefore not simply about recycling or a critique of consumerism. It explores how materials and meanings can be transferred from one context to another.

Something mass-produced and temporary, whose value is usually tied to the product it contains, becomes individual, carefully constructed, and potentially lasting through the artist's work. Viewers encounter familiar elements of everyday life in unexpected combinations, shaped by shifts in meaning, humour, echoes of art history, and surprising figures.

The title PAPPWELT can be understood literally as a world made of cardboard, but also as a reflection of contemporary life, in which goods, images, and materials constantly circulate and take on new meanings. Used everyday packaging gives rise to a new visual world, where familiar materials acquire unexpected forms.

In PAPPWELT, packaging is no longer something that surrounds the actual content. The packaging itself has become the content.