The current exhibition is the last stage in the Museums in Motion international cooperation programme involving Kumu, Turku and Malmö Art Museums. The first stage in 2008 brought to Kumu a remarkable art event from Finland – the Golden Age of Finnish Art exhibition compiled on the basis of Turku’s collections. Under the Red Flags, a display of socialist realism, was put together from works in the Art Museum of Estonia, and has been a public success in Turku as well as in Malmö.

I Love Malmö introduces the Malmö Art Museum collection, one of the largest and most remarkable in Sweden (outside Stockholm) primarily because of the museum’s policy of focusing on Nordic art. The exhibition was conceived, and the works selected, by Kumu curators Eha Komissarov and Maria-Kristiina Soomre, who sought the particularities of Nordic art through its more famous narratives. Kumu shows the work of 49 artists and groups, most of whom are internationally acclaimed and have significantly influenced the developments of contemporary art. According to the director of Malmö Art Museum, Göran Christenson, art in the Nordic countries has become international and therefore concepts such as ‘local’, ‘regional’ and ‘national’ are no longer apposite. This is also proved by the current exhibition in Kumu, which includes both Scandinavian and international art stars.

The exhibition is based on topics, with occasional classics from the national-romantic art in the Nordic countries at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The works of the great names in art history, such as Richard Bergh, Anders Zorn, August Strindberg and Vilhelm Hammershøi, primarily emphasise the remarkable survival of nature motifs, treatment of art and the traditions of psychological art, whereas the chosen works all seem topical and contemporary today. One of the pearls in the Malmö collections, the numerous drawings of Carl Fredrik Hill, is introduced as a special phenomenon.