21 Sept. 2013 - 9 Feb. 2014
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Carl-Henning Pedersen's birth, the ARKEN Museum and the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum will present a large-scale collaborative exhibition of works by the Danish Cobra painter, to be shown at ARKEN in the spring of 2013 and at CHPEAM in the fall of 2013.
Like many other artists of his generation, Carl-Henning Pedersen was inspired freely by art and artefacts from other times and cultures. His fantasizing artistic idiom brings together a wide range of visual expressions cutting across time and place. In his work as an artist he was searching for a universally human primordial force that also flowed through himself. The exhibition throws light on this theme through the selection and mediation of his works.
The longing for a pure, unspoiled and natural art was typical of the period. Carl-Henning Pedersen and his colleagues were thus in opposition to their own time which was haunted by war and injustice.
Carl-Henning Pedersen loved art and spared no effort to get close to it. In 1939, he wanted to experience an exhibition in Paris, a city that housed many of the artists he admired but until then had known only through reproductions. Since he had neither a car nor money for a train ticket, he had to travel by foot. He walked most of the way – both out and home again. This was to be the first of many journeys to France, and after the purchase of Karel Appel's house in 1977, France became Carl-Henning Pedersen's second home. He also became represented by two French galleries, Galerie de France and Galerie Ariel, both located in Paris.
Carl-Henning Pedersen works are represented in major international collections and museums worldwide, such as MoMa (Museum of Modern Art), New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; State Art Museum, Bucharest; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; AroS, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark.
In collaboration with CHPEAM, ARKEN will be showing a large-scale retrospective of Carl-Henning Pedersen's oeuvre, based on CHPEAM's collection of several thousand works and the museum's archive of a large amount of unpublished material (letters, manuscripts, cuttings, diaries).
The exhibition examines Carl-Henning Pedersen's sources of inspiration and method of working in order to clarify his view of history. His sources of inspiration and method of working are characteristic of his time. He, like many of his generation, including the other Cobra artists, found their inspiration in cultural areas outside the traditional evolutionary western-European history of art, for example in popular art, primitive art and children's drawings. The artists wanted to show an identification with cultural artefacts and visual expressions extending beyond time and place. The inspiration was ahistorical in the sense that Carl-Henning Pedersen was more interested in the objects than in their original, cultural and often functional context, seeing them instead as timeless, universally human, primordial forms that he could use and be inspired by as an artist.