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30/1/2013

Carl-Henning Pedersen

Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj

The exhibition Carl-Henning Pedersen 100 years will show works from the whole of Carl-Henning Pedersen’s artistic career, from the end of the 1930s until his death in 2007. Visitors are invited into his colourful, dream-like visual world. The imagination is given free rein when birds, ships and sun-stars meet in a magical universe where the canvases glow with Carl-Henning Pedersen’s joy in painting. The over 200 works in the exhibition comprise paintings, watercolours, oil-crayon drawings, ceramics, mosaics and Carl-Henning Pedersen’s own poems. For the first time, too, newly composed music forms part of an exhibition at the museum. The composer Fuzzy, with inspiration from Carl-Henning Pedersen’s art, has created a unique musical work for the largest room in the exhibition.

Besides the artist’s well known pictorial universe, ARKEN’s exhibition also demonstrates the variety of Carl-Henning Pedersen’s art: war pictures typified by wildness and horror, the eruption of energy in the Cobra years, and later examples of a more texturally oriented surface painting. Joie de vivre vies with a mood of seriousness, the playfully light with thoroughly elaborated paintings where the paint in itself is explored and exploited to the utmost in lumpy, material-rich surfaces. Several works are experienced for the first time at this exhibition, including some of the artist’s last works in the form of 15 watercolours from 2005.

Of the imaginative universe of Carl-Henning Pedersen the director of ARKEN, Christian Gether, says: “The poetry and the dream of a better life in Carl-Henning Pedersen’s art send a necessary and important message to the overburdened people of our time”.

The spontaneous painter
It was never in the cards that Carl-Henning Pedersen (1913-2007) would become a painter. He grew up in a poor working-class home in Valby and as a young man dreamt of becoming a composer. At the age of 20 he met his wife-to-be, the painter Else Alfelt, who introduced him to visual art. Just three years later they made their debut together at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition.

The artworks in the exhibition have been carefully selected from the many thousand that Carl-Henning Pedersen created over seven decades. He possessed an incredible urge to create, and painted right up to his death in 2007. Carl-Henning Pedersen himself thought his first pictures were his best, and throughout his life he strove to conjure up the absolutely direct, spontaneous picture with his brush. He sought the purity of the child, and was inspired by so-called primitive folk art from all countries and times. In particular, Nordic folk art and art from the Viking Era and Middle Ages fascinated the artist. Entirely untamed by classic academicism, his works emerged with a raw expressive power: impulsive, fantasizing and fragmented. Today Carl-Henning Pedersen stands as an exponent of the post-war period’s spontaneous-abstract painting, but the exhibition shows that he found his style as early as the 1930s.

Catalogue
For the exhibition a research-based, richly illustrated catalogue is being produced in Danish and English, with seven articles, a biography and a selection of the artist’s poems. It reproduces more than 100 of the exhibition’s works as well as documentary pictorial material from the rich archives at the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum. The publication offers a broad introduction to the artist’s work and at the same time offers new, surprising angles on themes such as the spontaneous, the connections between the painterly and the literary, the inspiration from the photographic medium and the significance of the artist’s large decoration works. In addition ARKEN is producing a film about the artist in collaboration with the DR K television channel.

Carl-Henning Pedersen 100 years is part of the exhibition series Passion and Insight, which is supported by Nordea-fonden.

The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue have been produced in collaboration with the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum in Herning, which will be showing the exhibition from 21 September 2013 until 9 February 2014.

Contact information
Head of Communications Marie-Louise Dunker, phone: +45 40 87 27 47 or marielouise.dunker@arken.dk
Press Coordinator, Lea Bolvig, phone +45 30 45 67 18 or lea.bolvig@arken.dk

Opening of the exhibition on Thursday 31 January at 11am

Arken Museum of Modern Art
Skovvej 100, Ishoj
Tues-Sun 10-17, Wed 10-21

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