ArtistDanishb.1921–d.2019
Albert Bertelsen
3 active items
Albert Bertelsen grew up in Vejle on the Jutland peninsula, and the landscapes of his childhood - flat fields, subdued light, the particular quality of Danish winter skies - never quite left him. He had no formal art training, but an encounter with the work of the CoBrA painter Henry Heerup set him on a path toward painting. His first exhibition came in Copenhagen in 1950, and by 1960 he had committed fully to life as a professional artist.
For the first two decades of his career, Bertelsen mined childhood memory almost exclusively. The figures in those early paintings are seen from below, as a small person would see them - adults looming, rooms oversized, the world tinged with a child's particular mix of wonder and unease. The palette was muted, the brushwork loose, and the mood somewhere between tenderness and strangeness.
A journey to Norway in 1973 changed the scale of his vision. The open fjord country and its vast, indifferent skies pulled him away from interiors and toward landscape. He followed that impulse to the Faroe Islands, and the archipelago proved transformative. The Atlantic light - perpetually shifting between fog and clarity - matched something in his sensibility. He returned repeatedly, working in oil on canvas and in graphic media, building up a body of Faroese work that became the most identifiable part of his output. Green dominated: the saturated greens of Faroese hillsides under overcast skies, the darker greens of valleys half-hidden by mist.
France, Iceland and Norway each contributed their own motifs over the following decades, but the Faroe Islands remained his primary subject. Bertelsen worked into his late nineties, dying in December 2019 at the age of 98. His work sits in Norwegian national collections and in Danish public holdings, and it was consistently exhibited across Scandinavia throughout his career.
At auction, Bertelsen appears most frequently at Bruun Rasmussen, where his Faroese oils draw the strongest interest. A 1984 oil titled "Mountain Mist, Faroe Islands" is among the highest recorded sales in Scandinavian auction data, reaching 25,000 DKK. Painted works on canvas consistently outperform his lithographic output. Auctionist currently holds 20 auction records for Bertelsen, with 3 lots active at the time of writing.