KunstenaarDanish
Carl-Henning Pedersen
5 actieve items
Carl-Henning Pedersen (1913–2007) was born in Copenhagen and grew up in the working-class neighbourhood near Vigerslev Alle. He had no formal art training and developed his visual language largely on his own, encouraged by his partner and later wife, painter Else Alfelt, whom he met at the International Folk High School in Elsinore in 1933. He first exhibited publicly in 1936 at the Artists' Autumn Exhibition in Copenhagen.
In 1939, Pedersen walked to Paris, where he encountered works by Picasso and Matisse. On the return journey he visited the Nazi "degenerate art" exhibition in Frankfurt, where the paintings of Marc Chagall struck him as a revelation and became a lasting reference point throughout his career. He and Alfelt were founding members of the CoBrA movement in 1948, a collective of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam who rejected rationalism in favour of spontaneous, expressive imagery drawn from folk art, children's drawings, and myth.
Pedersen's signature world is populated by giant birds, golden ships, sun-faced creatures, horses, and swirling cosmos in saturated reds, blues, and yellows. His canvases have a charged, dreamlike density that sets him apart even within CoBrA. From the 1960s onward he moved into monumental public art, including the large mosaic "Cosmic Sea" and, from 1983 to 1987, a full programme of murals, painted glass, and mosaics for the Romanesque cathedral in Ribe illustrating scenes from the Bible.
Pedersen famously resisted selling his work and donated thousands of pieces to the Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelt Museum in Herning, which opened in 1976 and holds one of Scandinavia's largest collections by a single artist. His awards include the Eckersberg Medal (1950), the Guggenheim Award (1958), the Thorvaldsen Medal (1963), the Henrik Steffens Award (1969), and the Prins Eugen Medal (1980). Denmark sent him as its representative to the Venice Biennale in 1962, and a retrospective was held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1961.
At auction, Pedersen's works appear regularly at the major Danish houses, led by Bruun Rasmussen. Oil paintings from the CoBrA years command the strongest prices, with works such as "Indianerhoved" (1948) reaching 22,000 DKK and figure compositions from the same period selling in the 11,000–15,000 NOK range. Watercolours and gouaches on paper trade at more accessible levels. Demand is steady among Scandinavian collectors, and institutional recognition keeps his market floor firm.