Thyra Hilden — boundary-breaking Danish artist whose latest work ‘Equal Satire’ stirred international press buzz at Enter Art Fair when her fierce, vulva-shaped banana got sold for 11.000 €.
Thyra Hilden is a Danish visual artist known for pushing boundaries — from setting the Colosseum “on fire” in her globally broadcast City on Fire project, to her acclaimed symmetrical oil paintings picked up by Reuters and Euronews 2020.
Her latest work, Equal Satire — a banana cut open to evoke a vulva — garnered significant international press attention when it sold at Enter Art Fair 2025.
Thyra Hilden (b. 1972) is a Danish visual artist educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and represented by Gallery MAXUS101. Early in her career, she studied under professor and painter Claus Carstensen alongside Tal R, John Kørner, Suzette Gemzøe, Kirstine Reupstoff and Kasper Bonnen. From 2001–2010, Hilden gained international recognition for the large-scale installation project City on Fire, which projected blazing light onto cultural landmarks including Copenhagen Cathedral, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, and the Colosseum in Rome. The work was featured at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv alongside artists such as Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami, and received extensive coverage from global media outlets including BBC, CNN, Euronews, Associated Press, and RAI.
Since 2020, Hilden has developed monumental symmetrical oil paintings inspired by the psychological inkblot tests of Hermann Rorschach and their reinterpretation by Andy Warhol. These works, which explore the natural symmetry of living forms, brought her renewed international attention through Reuters and Euronews.
Building on this research, Hilden created the solo exhibition Ride the Tiger (Gallery MAXUS101, 2025), which marked a striking shift in her practice. Here, she moved beyond the flat surface, cutting and bending the canvas into almost sculptural wall-objects. These works appear as powerful vulva-like forms—not passive representations, but vital expressions of feminine power that insist on the right to define themselves. Through a raw, destructive treatment of the canvas, Hilden fuses creation and destruction into a new visual language that is both sensuous and conceptually rigorous, situating her in dialogue with artists such as Hannah Wilke, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Louise Bourgeois while pointing toward a younger generation of feminist voices.
The exhibition Ride the Tiger directly paved the way for her next work, Equal Satire. While Ride the Tiger transformed the canvas into sculptural, vulva-like forms—asserting feminine power through a raw interplay of destruction and creation—Equal Satiredistills this exploration into a single, striking gesture: a banana split open to evoke the shape of a vulva. Where Ride the Tiger confronted the viewer with monumental and visceral materiality, Equal Satire sharpens this feminist statement into a satirical icon, using humour and simplicity to expose how female sexuality is perceived and commodified. It carries the same insistence on self-definition, but with an ironic, pop-cultural twist.
Thyra also ventures into alternative pop, with music championed by Danmarks Radio’s KarriereKanonen and featured 3 times on Spotify’s New Music Friday.
Thyra lives and work in Copenhagen Denmark