ArtistDanishb.1943–d.2013
Kurt Trampedach
3 active items
The face that appears most often in Kurt Trampedach's paintings is his own - but not as he was, exactly. The jaw may be too wide, the eyes offset, the skull elongated in ways that suggest something pressing from within. Self-portraiture was for him not vanity or exercise but a form of diagnosis, a way of looking steadily at states of mind that were otherwise difficult to hold still.
Born in Hillerød, north of Copenhagen, in 1943, Trampedach studied at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1963 to 1969. His breakthrough came in the late 1960s and his reputation grew through the 1970s, when his figures - distorted self-portraits, portraits of his wife, large-headed babies, horses - attracted serious critical attention. The dark, brooding palette and the psychological intensity of his images drew consistent comparisons to Rembrandt, whose influence Trampedach acknowledged directly. Like Rembrandt, he returned obsessively to his own face as a subject, tracking something that changed year by year.
Painting was bound up, for Trampedach, with his own mental health. He lived with depression and mania, and the studio was where those states got worked through visually rather than suppressed. This made his practice intensely personal, and also made external disruptions to it unusually destructive. In 1983, his Copenhagen studio was set on fire - he believed it was deliberate, the act of jealous peers - and many finished paintings were lost. In April 2002, his home and studio in the French Pyrenees burned down while he was in Denmark for an exhibition. Within weeks, his Copenhagen studio was set on fire again, destroying seven large paintings. The accumulated losses drove him into a severe depression from which he largely did not recover. He produced little work in his final years and died in 2013.
Between the fires lay a substantial body of work and institutional recognition. He received the Eckersberg Medal in 1984, one of Denmark's significant art honors. His paintings entered the collections of Statens Museum for Kunst, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum (Kunsten), Vejle Kunstmuseum, Kunstmuseet Trapholt, Skive Kunstmuseum, and Randers Kunstmuseum. A major retrospective at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg in 2018-2019, titled "Dark Encounters", drew on loans from Danish museums and private collections to survey the key works of the 1960s and 1970s.
In Auctionist's database, all 23 items are paintings and prints, dominated by Bruun Rasmussen - the house most active in his market, accounting for the large majority of listings. The top recorded result in our database is an oil on paper at DKK 34,000, alongside multiple self-portrait works. On the broader international market, his record stands at approximately USD 63,000 for "Selvportræt, siddende" (Self-portrait, seated) sold at Bruun Rasmussen in 2012.