Kay Christensen - The Eternal Adventure

The exhibition Kay Christensen - The Eternal Fairy Tale is a tribute to the Danish painter Kay Christensen (1899-1981) for his narrative and poetic contribution to Danish art. It is the first major museum exhibition of the artist's works since 1981.

Kay Christensen remained one of a kind in Danish art with his fine sense of expressive colour and textural beauty. He grew up in a culturally interested home where his interest in art, music and poetry was awakened at an early age.

Throughout his career, Kay Christensen focussed on the familiar and intimate, with the woman and the child as leading motifs, but during the 1940s, the boundaries between external reality and the artist's inner world became increasingly blurred. His figures begin to resemble lyrical fairytale characters placed in a borderland between dream and reality. Like Marc Chagall, Kay Christensen occasionally let his figures float in space, including the fairytale figure Miriam, who for Kay Christensen became a consistent symbol of beauty and happiness in life.

Kay Christensen was a storyteller, both in his pictures and in writing. In addition to illustrating the works of others, he often created his own synthesis of word and image, for example in his large lithographic book Eventyret om Evigglæde og de fire Vinde (1948). In his paintings, he transformed the sensuous, poetic and linear flow of words that characterised his stories into dreamlike motifs, where the transition between foreground and background often blends into a light veil of small brushstrokes.

Kay Christensen was an artist where the genius of colour and poetry was vividly present, and where the flowers of fairy tales unfolded on the canvas. His works are at once joyful and sombre, poetic and eerie. They all contain the eternal fairy tale within them.

The exhibition KAY CHRISTENSEN - THE ETERNAL ADVENTURE is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with new articles by author and art historian Peter Michael Hornung, author Dy Plambeck, photographer and son Krass Clement, cand.mag. Minna Sevaldsen and curator Maria Kappel Blegvad. In addition, ARoS has collaborated with Staalfilm to create a film adaptation of Kay Christensen's illustrated book The Everlasting Joy and the Four Winds from 1948. The film is shown at the exhibition and takes us on an adventurous journey into the artist's colourful and dark universe.