Nervetråde (Nerve Fibers) revolves around the grotesque, tracing threads from the nervous sensibility of literature around 1900, when Den Frie was founded, to the frayed nerves of contemporary art. The exhibition brings together works by Danish and international artists whose works pulse with the unease and strangeness running through our time.

In Nervetråde, the grotesque emerges as a distinct way of engaging with the world, making the familiar strange through distortion, displacement and contrast. The exhibition draws inspiration from a number of Danish writers who, at the turn of the twentieth century, broke with realist modes of writing through narratives that embraced the peculiar, the morbid, the nervous and the bizarre. Their writing suggested that behind the familiar world of everyday life lay another, more unstable one; the works in the exhibition do the same.

Drawing on this strain in Danish literature, which has received renewed attention in recent years, the exhibition…