COPENHAGEN — Outside Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art on a recent late-summer morning, a few sunstruck visitors were sprawling on the turf of the sculpture garden, between monumental outdoor works by Alexander Calder and Richard Serra. Beyond them, facing east toward Sweden, the waters of the Oresund strait were a serene blue, lightly scalloped with wind. The scent of freshly cut grass was in the air.

Inside, however, it was another world. Under chilly artificial light, art handlers were hoisting large prints onto white gallery walls. One was an abstract, composition of fuzzy shadows and white splotches, like a Jackson Pollock viewed under a microscope: in fact, a recent NASA image of the moon’s surface. Nearby, another work was already up — a reproduction of a childlike engraving from 1793 by the English artist William Blake. It depicts a tiny figure climbing a ladder that reaches all the way to the moon. Blake’s caption beneath the picture reads, “I want! I want!”

As the Louisiana’s new exhibition, “The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,” reveals, humans have wanted the moon for most of our history — wanted to understand it, capture it, land on it, own it. The show, which runs through Jan. 20, is notionally inspired by the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, yet its focus isn’t solely on science or spacecraft, but on art and literature, too. Indeed, the suggestion is that we cannot hope to comprehend the moon if we try to pin it down to one thing. Every time we look up, it’s different.