Jens Ulrich Petersen

His own description of his method is blunt: "When painting, I do not make pictures, I tell stories." The stories he tells are tragicomedies. The paintings carry a wry humour at the surface - the figures are almost cartoonishly small against their grounds - but the underlying subject is serious. Petersen draws on a literary tradition rather than a painterly one: the Kafkaesque labyrinth in which ordinary people find themselves trapped by logic they cannot parse and institutions that cannot hear them.

The recurring series "Snoremænd" (Men on a String, or Stringmen) gives this theme its most literal form. Figures are literally suspended by a thread, dependent and exposed, at the compositional periphery. The high or low placement of the horizon line - a characteristic visual device in Petersen's work - amplifies the sense of precariousness. Critics have compared his spatial and thematic sensibility to Edward Hopper: a shared interest in loneliness, in the city as a place of isolation, in the person who exists at a slight remove from the world they inhabit.

Petersen has exhibited internationally, with shows at Den Frie in Copenhagen, Kunsthal Aarhus, and recurring participations in Kunstnernes Sommerudstilling and Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling. He has also exhibited in Greenland, at Maniitsoq Museum and in Qaqortoq, taking his work into contexts far outside the Danish art mainstream. He has lived 30 years abroad from Denmark, a biographical fact that inflects the displacement and dislocation running through much of his painting.

At auction, Petersen's work in the Auctionist database consists entirely of paintings, with all 23 recorded items concentrated at Stockholms Auktionsverk. The "Snoremænd" series in acrylic on canvas accounts for the majority of works sold. Prices have ranged from around 1,500 to 2,201 SEK on this platform, broadly in line with his international auction range. His record price globally stands at approximately 1,289 USD, set at Historia Auktionshaus in 2024.