ArtistDanishb.1910–d.1993
Richard Mortensen
4 active items
In the early 1930s, a young Copenhagen art student co-founded a group called Linien together with Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen and Ejler Bille, and in doing so helped introduce abstract and surrealist thinking to a Danish art world that was largely unprepared for it. Richard Mortensen had studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1931 to 1932, and his early large-format coloristic compositions became the first serious abstract paintings in Danish art history. The canvases were not quiet experiments - they were declarations.
A 1937 trip to Paris put Mortensen in contact with the Surrealist circle around André Breton, including André Masson, Roger Vitrac, and Raymond Queneau. The encounter deepened his formal vocabulary without fully converting him to Surrealism. After the death of his wife Sonja Hauberg, Mortensen moved to Paris permanently in 1947 and remained there until 1964. It was in Paris that his work underwent its most decisive transformation: through the Galerie Denise René, where he and sculptor Robert Jacobsen became central figures, he moved toward the hard-edged geometry and flat color planes of Concrete art.
The late Paris works - and those made after his return to Copenhagen - are characterized by large, sharply delineated fields of pure color, often organized in compositions of striking optical tension. Gone was the lyrical looseness of the early abstractions. In their place came a measured, almost architectural approach to the picture surface. Mortensen was not working in isolation: Galerie Denise René was the hub of European geometric abstraction, and his presence there placed him alongside figures such as Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin.
Back in Denmark from 1964, Mortensen took up a professorship at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, which he held until 1980. His awards include the Edvard Munch Prize (1946), the Kandinsky Prize (1950), the Prince Eugen Medal (1967), and the Thorvaldsen Medal (1968). His work is held in major Danish collections including Statens Museum for Kunst, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, and Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg. In 2024, ARoS mounted a large retrospective - "Between Lines" - featuring over 80 paintings and works on paper, confirming his place as a foundational figure in Danish modernism.
On the Nordic auction market, Mortensen appears regularly at Bruun Rasmussen, which accounts for the majority of his auction appearances on Auctionist. His 35 catalogued items include paintings and prints, with works such as "Bourgogne" (a silkscreen after his 1956 painting) and the collage series from the 1970s-90s representing the range of his output. Top prices in the database reach 15,000 NOK, reflecting the solid but not speculative character of his secondary market in Scandinavia.