Doll Parts: Form, Body & Presence
31 January – 5 March 2026

To kick off the 2026 gallery programme, Kyst Gallery brings together seven paintings by three female artists, Lenette Ea Lyngfeldt Vacher, Diana Ortuño, and Simone S. Poulsen, in DOLL PARTS: Form, Body & Presence. The exhibition examines the female body as both subject and material, exploring how form, gesture, and surface operate as sites of memory, projection, and expectation.

DOLL PARTS is an exhibition that shows how, through artistic creation, women reclaim and empower the female bodies. The works speak to the ongoing negotiation between the female body and the world around it.  “From a young age, female bodies are subject to scrutiny, expectation, and consumption, shaped by narrow and often unrealistic standards of beauty. The exhibition asserts a strong position: that the body belongs to the self. Even when it is broken, it is beautiful. Even when it differs from others, it remains worthy of being seen,” said Cherry Rao, curator and gallery director.

Lenette Ea Lyngfeldt Vacher is a Danish artist and writer based in Copenhagen. She began painting seriously following a heart transplant in 2020 and has since exhibited widely across Denmark. Working primarily with acrylic, Vacher creates intimate, psychologically charged figures that investigate the relationship between body and presence. Her practice centres on boundaries, gaze, and the tension between vulnerability and strength within the human form. Notably, despite the often grand scale of her paintings, Vacher works with the smallest of paintbrushes, building dreamy, transcendent layers of colour and texture that lend her canvases a distinctive sense of intensity.

At the centre of the exhibition space stands Mother Nature, a two metre high painting depicting a female body confined within a box, positioned in apparent discomfort yet bearing a face that remains calm and unfettered. The work speaks to the immense capacity of the female body to endure, absorb, and persist. In Mother Nature, strength emerges through the accumulated resilience of women as they move through life.

Diana Ortuño is a Spanish painter based in Copenhagen. She brings an incisive visual language to her work, drawing on personal experience and a multicultural background. Her figures balance humour and unease, revealing how identity and embodiment are shaped by context and daily life. Ortuño’s paintings often depict female figures with disproportionately small heads and massive bodies, reflecting how female bodies are frequently foregrounded over women’s intellect or interior lives. This distortion functions as both critique and personal reflection.

The exhibition features a self-portrait of Ortuño taking a selfie with her mobile phone. The work stages a contemporary interplay between the urge to document the self and the shifting perception of the self. Simone S. Poulsen works primarily in two-dimensional media, using analogue graphic methods and drawing, with paper as her principal material. She holds a degree in Architecture, a background that informs her sensitivity to structure, surface, and composition. Alongside her visual practice, Poulsen occasionally participates in art performances.

Poulsen’s visual language is simple, insistent, and exploratory, driven by intuition and emotion. Figures emerge in a state of tension, at times brutal and at times fragile, reflecting the difficulty and urgency of self-expression. A sense of naivety runs through her practice, rooted in a deliberate attempt to work from an open, less defined position. Together, the three artists present the female body as a site of tension and resilience. Fragmented yet insistent, vulnerable yet enduring, the works invite viewers to reconsider how bodies are seen, judged, and asked to carry meaning.  


Read more
artnet: Doll Parts - Form, Body & Presence
Kyst Magazine: Doll Parts - Form, Body & Presence
CommonWealth Magazine: Doll Parts - the Female Body in Negotiation