Richard Mortensen - Grafik

The exhibition presented selected works from the museum's graphic collection by Richard Mortensen on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth. 'Richard Mortensen - Grafik' included 12 drawings from the 30s and 40s and 40 graphic works from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

Richard Mortensen was born in 1910 and is considered the artist who has had the greatest impact on the development of abstract art in Denmark. Throughout his life, working with graphics was an essential part of his artistic work.

In the 1930s, surrealism influenced his images and he worked with automatic drawing, where the subconscious mind controlled the line.

The horrors of war in the 1940s had made his art expressive and violently emotional. But after the war, he settled in Paris and became part of the milieu around Galerie Denise René, which cultivated Constructivism. Concrete art was to serve as a model for the creation of a better world.

When he returned to Denmark in 1964 as a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, his abstract paintings were characterised by figures with more rounded organic forms. According to Richard Mortensen, place, time and personal experiences will necessarily be reflected in the artwork, even if the image is non-figurative.

Historical, literary, geographical and political references constantly appear in the titles of his 1970s works. Similarly, his interest in Zen Buddhism characterises his paintings from the 1980s, while he continued to work towards greater formal simplification right up until his death in 1993.