ArtistDanish
Erik A. Frandsen
0 active items
Born on 20 April 1957 in a small village outside Randers, Denmark, Erik August Frandsen took no formal art school route. Instead, he traveled across Europe as a young man - studying ceramics in Greece in the 1970s, training as a sculptor in Carrara, Italy, and working as a graphic artist in Paris. That self-directed education left its mark: his practice is resolutely multi-media, moving between painting, photography, mosaic and installation without settling in any single discipline.
In 1981 Frandsen returned to Denmark and co-founded Værkstedet Værst, a studio community and exhibition space in Copenhagen that became the nucleus of de unge vilde - the loosely grouped Danish neo-expressionist movement of the early 1980s. Working alongside Lars Nørgård and Christian Lemmerz, the collective staged some of the most energetically raw exhibitions in Danish art of the decade. Værkstedet Værst closed in 1983-84, but the working relationships and visual appetite it generated continued to shape Frandsen's output for years afterward.
His work draws on art history with a certain irreverence. Pop and neo-pop references - Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Gary Hume - coexist in his paintings with gestures toward art deco and rococo. His recurring flower compositions are deliberately anti-decorative: thistles and dandelions in urine bottles and kitsch vases, placed at the center of interior scenes. From 2004 he extended the motif into large stainless-steel sheets, polishing and engraving sensuous flower images directly onto reflective surfaces - a formal decision that collapses painting and sculpture into a single object.
The institutional recognition of his work came gradually and then decisively. In 1992 he was selected for Documenta IX in Kassel - the first Danish artist to participate in the exhibition's history. His work 'Home', shown there, was subsequently acquired by Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK). Collections at Arken Museum of Modern Art, ARoS, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the New Carlsberg Glyptotek hold his work. In 2010 he contributed to the interior decoration of Frederik VIII's Palace at Amalienborg, alongside Tal R, Olafur Eliasson and Jesper Christiansen. He received the Eckersberg Medal in 1996 and was awarded the Order of the Dannebrog in 2010.
At Nordic auction, Frandsen's work appears primarily through Bruun Rasmussen, which accounts for nearly all of the 20 works that have passed through the market on Auctionist. The catalogue spans paintings, prints and a sculpture, with mixed-media and works on paper driving most of the results. The top recorded sale on this platform reached DKK 17,500, for a mixed-technique work titled 'Alienation Penetration'. Prices across the catalogue are modest relative to his institutional profile, reflecting the secondary market's stronger appetite for his paintings than for works on paper and prints.