Hans Scherfig
18 Sep 2010 - 25 Apr 2011
HANS SCHERFIG
Welcome to the Jungle
18 September, 2010 – 25 April, 2011
This fall, ARKEN presents a lavish exhibition of the celebrated Danish writer and painter HANS SCHERFIG (1905-1979). As a writer, Scherfig skewered the educational system of his day and other prime targets, including bourgeois society, Nazism and capitalism. As a self-taught painter, his subject, in more senses than one, was the jungle.
The exhibition features Scherfig’s popular paintings of tropical jungles, where wild animals live in peaceful coexistence, as well as his less well-known, critical paintings of capitalist urban society, where the law of the jungle reigns supreme.
Scherfig’s jungle paintings, inhabited by elephants, tapirs, okapis and monkeys, are part of every Dane’s visual cultural heritage. Scherfig was a communist and a man of his times. The jungle paintings are images of ideal utopian societies with room for everyone. They express the artist’s longing for a better world.
Welcome to the Jungle
18 September, 2010 – 25 April, 2011
This fall, ARKEN presents a lavish exhibition of the celebrated Danish writer and painter HANS SCHERFIG (1905-1979). As a writer, Scherfig skewered the educational system of his day and other prime targets, including bourgeois society, Nazism and capitalism. As a self-taught painter, his subject, in more senses than one, was the jungle.
The exhibition features Scherfig’s popular paintings of tropical jungles, where wild animals live in peaceful coexistence, as well as his less well-known, critical paintings of capitalist urban society, where the law of the jungle reigns supreme.
Scherfig’s jungle paintings, inhabited by elephants, tapirs, okapis and monkeys, are part of every Dane’s visual cultural heritage. Scherfig was a communist and a man of his times. The jungle paintings are images of ideal utopian societies with room for everyone. They express the artist’s longing for a better world.