ArtistDanishb.1921–d.1988
Mogens Balle
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Mogens Balle was born in Copenhagen in 1921 and began his studies in architecture before abandoning the profession to pursue painting full time. His early work in the mid-1940s drew on naturalist conventions, but a period spent in France shifted his orientation decisively. Exposure to Picasso's cubism and the French avant-garde loosened his formal vocabulary, and by 1945 he had moved fully into abstract painting populated by strange, biomorphic fantasy figures.
In 1947 Balle co-founded the Danish artists' association Spiralen, where he encountered Asger Jorn and Wilhelm Freddie. Through Jorn he was drawn into the international orbit of CoBrA, the postwar movement linking artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam in a shared commitment to spontaneity, myth, and raw material expression. Balle formally joined CoBrA in 1949 and from 1951 onward participated in the group's exhibitions across France, the Netherlands, North and South America, Japan, and Denmark.
The 1960s brought a productive collaboration with the Belgian poet and CoBrA co-founder Christian Dotremont. Together they made joint drawings and so-called word-paintings, where Dotremont's improvised script wound through Balle's painted surfaces, dissolving the boundary between writing and image. Around the same time Balle extended his fantasy figures into three dimensions, producing bronze sculptures that gave physical weight to the creatures that had inhabited his canvases for two decades. His output ultimately spanned painting, gouache, watercolor, printmaking, drawing, ceramics, and sculpture.
Balle's work entered the permanent collections of the CoBrA Museum in Amstelveen, the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image imprimee in La Louviere, Belgium, among other institutions.
On the Nordic auction market Balle appears primarily at Bruun Rasmussen, which accounts for the majority of his 29 lots indexed on Auctionist, split between Danish houses in Aarhus and Lyngby, with further appearances at Svendborg Auktionerne and Halmstads Auktionskammare in Sweden. Works are predominantly oils on canvas and prints. The strongest recorded hammer price in our database is 18,000 DKK for an untitled oil, with a second oil from the 1976-1978 period reaching 16,500 DKK. Seven lots are currently active.