ArtistDanish
Preben Wölck
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The paintings Preben Wölck made in his early career have the weight of the landscape he grew up in. Born on 14 January 1925 in Nykøbing Mors on the island of Mors in northwest Jutland, he was drawn from an early age to what he called 'the humble places' - the unremarkable corners of everyday life and the low, flat terrain of his home island. Figures appear in these early works as dense, simplified forms, built from stereometric shapes and positioned frontally against the picture plane, coloured in earth tones and outlined with deliberate heaviness.
In 1949, Wölck was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where he trained until 1956. The years at the Academy gave him a technical grounding, but the decisive shift in his work came not from formal instruction but from engagement with international currents of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The spontaneous abstract painting emerging from New York and Paris - work that prioritised the physical act of painting over pictorial representation - reached Danish artists through exhibitions and reproduction, and Wölck responded with genuine conviction.
By the early 1960s, his figurative imagery had dissolved. The new paintings were built from expressive accumulations of paint applied in thick, gestural layers, with a palette stripped back to black, white and grey. The pictures could still suggest landscapes - a horizon, a weight of sky - but the image had become a record of the act of painting itself rather than a description of a place. He dropped the Madsen from his name in 1962, signing work simply as Wolck, the same year his mature abstract practice was fully established.
A title that appeared among his works - 'Portrait of Jackson Pollock' - points to where he located himself: within a conversation with American abstract expressionism, treating its key figure as a subject worthy of portraiture. This is less an act of hero worship than a declaration of artistic lineage, a way of situating his own spontaneous approach within a wider international context.
Wölck died on 9 June 2000. At auction, his paintings appear almost exclusively at Bruun Rasmussen's Copenhagen and Aarhus rooms, where all 13 recorded lots have been catalogued under Paintings. Prices have ranged between 2,000 and 3,400 DKK, with oil on paper and oil on board among the recorded media. The market remains modest, positioning him as a painter of interest for collectors of mid-century Danish abstraction rather than a broadly traded name.