From 21 January 2025 to 31 August 2025
THE ETERNITY OF NATURE
Else Alfelt (1910-1974)
In the black-and-white photograph, we see a woman stand-ing in a barren and rugged landscape. Smiling and full of anticipation, she gazes towards the sky, arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire universe and take in the world. The woman in the photograph is the artist Else Alfelt, depicted in the untamed nature surrounding the studio she shared with Carl-Henning Pedersen on the windswept North Sea coast of Jutland. She is captured amidst the majestic landscape that serves as the very focal point of her art. Standing there — on the dune, with the sky above her and an endless horizon stretching as far as the eye can see — we perceive the individual human as a tiny and almost unnoticeable piece in the vastness of the universe. This exact concept preoccupies Alfelt and is ever-present in her work, which never places humanity at its center but instead focusses on the different tenors of nature, celestial bodies, and the universe. As a child and young artist, Else Alfelt lives through both World War I and World War II. In a time of upheaval and uncertainty, nature and the universe become, to her, synonymous with something stable in a perpetually changing world.
Else Alfelt, Bovbjerg, 1961. Photo: Børge Venge
THE MOUNTAIN AS AN ARCHETYPE
Else Alfelt used automatic drawing as a basic structure in her early works, which often forms upward-striking peaks in the surface and gives clear reminders of mountains. However, it is not until the beginning of the 1940s that Alfelt herself begins to use the term ‘mountains’. The mountains grew into her art as an archetype, even before she herself named them as such and before she visited the mountains herself. In the archive of Else Alfelt, we find books that particularly interested her. Including an encyclopedia with mountain illustrations, “Images de l’Himmalaya” from 1941, which contains black and white photos of the Himalayan mountains. The worn pages testify that Alfelt diligently studied the mountains, which for decades constituted her most significant fascination and choice of motif. Only in 1943 did she manage to approach the mountains herself when visiting Sweden. This did not diminish her fascination.
Else Alfelt: Points reaching for the Sky, 1945
FORMATIVE JOURNEY TO THE NORTH
In 1943, Else Alfelt visited Sweden for the first time and was captivated by the magnificent nature she experienced there. With the boarders reopened in 1945, she was again able to travel. She shared her longing to go abroad with many other abstract artists, but where the vast majority of her colleagues headed towards the art metropolis of Paris, Alfelt looked north. Thus in the period 1945-48, she traveled for a total of several months around Swedish and Norwegian Lapland, while se in the summer of 1948 traveled to Iceland for the first time.
Else Alfelt’s fascination with the culture of Sami ant the untrodden nature is an expression of the desire of the desire she shared with the abstract artists to get to the original and unspoiled. She described is as a “need for a more human – beyond the whole world – way of thinking”. However it is significant for Else Alfelt that we do not find representations of the culture the sought out and was inspired by on her travels. Instead she paints the mountains, the sun and the rivers as archetypal common denominators that extend beyond the individual culture. She points to the fact that no matter where on earth we are or what time we are born into, it is the same earth we walk on, the same sky we look into, and the same moon we see when we look up. She conveys a transcendental space: “When I walk in the mountains, I have a fantastic feeling of connection with all times. There is nothing time-bound, I think that it has been like this in the very beginning, and it will be like this at the very end”, says Alfelt in an interview in 1950.
Else Alfelt: The Rainbow Bridge, Marsliden, 1946
THE ETERNAL MOTION OF THE UNIVERSE
In the 1960s, Else Alfelt created series of pictures in which the spiral shape becomes dominant. The spiral is, like the circle or the moon, an extract of the idea of the infinite and the cohesive forces the world consists of: A symbol of the cosmos, or “The Flower of the Universe”, as Alfelt called the more than fifty works that are all painted with the circle and the spiral as the basic idea. As in other of Else Alfelt’s series, she explores the same motif again and again, but now more systematically in series where the color varies and delivers new expressions to the repeated motif. The works in the series are each one painted on square plates, while the surface consists of a finely meshed network of circular pencil strokes that create centrifugal spiral movements.
The viewer’s gaze is directed into the image and then thrown back with great force in a continuous interaction. The pictures show a universe that is in constant motion. It is a thought that was highly topical in the present, when new discoveries in 1964 emphasized the Big Bang theory as a plausible explanation for the origin of the universe. The theory describes how the universe was created by an inconceivable force, and how it continues to move and expand. It is most likely this movement that we see in Else Alfelt’s late works “Flower of the Universe”. However, the works have equally large references to both Chinese Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which Alfelt met face to face for the first time while traveling to Japan in 1967. The interest in current research into the universe merges in the works alongside with the Eastern philosophy. They are various attempts to explain the inexplicable and thereby create order.
The repeated processing of the celestial bodies, nature and universe in these late works seems to merge into a higher unity. But while the expression may be new, Else Alfelt maintains that it is always the same thing she describes: the universe and the human being as an unmistakable small piece in the vast universe.
Else Alfelt, 1968