After being postponed due to the pandemic, The Nick Cave Exhibition is now open until February 13th, 2021, highlighting the musician, storyteller, and cultural icon. Throughout the 6 decades that Cave has collected or created objects in his creative and personal life, Stranger Than Kindness brings it all together with large-scale installations. Initially, for The Black Diamond of The Royal Danish Library and sponsored by Gucci, Cave was also the co-curator and designer of the exhibition, fusing biography, autobiography, and fiction while commenting on what shapes our lives and makes us who we are.

“When the Royal Danish Library contacted me with the idea of a ‘Nick Cave Exhibition’ I was reluctant to get involved. I am not nostalgic by nature and I had no time for a trip down Memory Lane,” Cave said. “But the team at the library were clearly serious people with a wonderful infectious energy and they drew me in!”

“We created an exhibition that feels unprecedented in its audacious reach, its feet rooted in the past while extending into the uncertain future. In the end we were able to put together an exhibition of extraordinary detail that commented on the fragile and vulnerable nature of identity. I am so proud to be a part of this unique and unorthodox exhibition—a shattered history we called Stranger Than Kindness,” he said.

Widely known through being the frontman of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the Australian musician’s new exhibit tracks his development as an artist, from his childhood in 1960’s Wangaratta to his chaotic years with his first bands, The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party. Stranger Than Kindness also allows viewers to gain insight on Cave’s overarching themes and main sources of influences in his music. “The exhibition reveals how Nick Cave’s life, music, archives, and fictions continue to intertwine, inform, and inspire each other,” reads the exhibition’s announcement. “Behind each work is an equally fascinating artistic process not originally intended for public view; the exhibition opens up the innermost parts of Cave’s creative universe and offers a story of its own.”

The artifacts include drafts, original artwork, handwritten lyrics, diaries, photographs, videos, found objects, and more objects that let the viewer into the creative and personal world of Nick Cave. “What you see in this exhibition lives in the intricate world constructed around the song or book or script or score. It is the material that gives birth to and nourishes this official work,” said Cave.

“There is an enormous amount of this peripheral stuff–drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages, scribblings, and drafts–which are the secret and unformed property of the artist,” said the musician. “These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script or score along. They are a support system of manic tangential information.”

Watch the trailer for Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition down below, sponsored by Gucci and on view at The Black Diamond in Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information and tickets, visit the website here.