16 Sept. 2010 – 24 Feb. 2011
Masks are a recurring theme in Carl-Henning Pedersen's work. We find the mask motif in his watercolours, ink drawings, paintings, and even his sculptures. We find them early and we find them late in the many works created during his long life.
Adopting a psychological approach, Masks Falling takes a look at selected works from the years around the start of the Second World War.
We see the masks as a shield against the existential aspects of life, a facade hiding the realities of life. Behind the masks we find life's many aspects: existential problems; sorrow, joy, struggles, love, survival, hiding.
This perspective could be applied to Carl-Henning Pedersen's life.
In his book on Carl-Henning Pedersen, Mikael Wivel describes him as “the man who laughs”. Not because he was always happy, but because of a habit acquired in his youth of laughing for no apparent reason when something affected him too much and became too hard to handle. It was a defence mechanism, an act of displacement, a safeguard, or indeed a mask. Henning was a private person, and he did not want others to enter into his private sphere uninvited.
But behind the facade, for better or worse, Henning was man like the rest of us. He, too, experienced sorrow, joy, love, hatred, pain, amusement, happiness.
Pedersen's interest in masks was inspired by primitive art. Masks from Africa south of Sahara, masks from New Zealand, New Guinea and the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean. Especially the masks from the Pacific region, painted in strong, pure colours, teeming with ornamental and figurative decorations resonated with him. But it was the ethnological mask, seen from an artistic point of view, that interested him, not the transformation of masks to modern forms.
In Les masques, 1948, the ethnologist Georges Buraud wrote that the mask made it possible to substitute the immutability of the species with new hybrid forms, enabling the individual to escape from his or her monotonous and powerless condition, according to need.
Perhaps this was why masks became such a permanent part of Carl-Henning Pedersen's visual language.