Kay Christensen
28 Sep 2013 - 26 Jan 2014
KAY CHRISTENSEN
The Eternal Fairy Tale
28 September 2013 – 26 January 2014
THE EXHIBITION KAY CHRISTENSEN – THE ETERNAL FAIRY TALE PAYS HOMAGE TO THE DANISH PAINTER KAY CHRISTENSEN (1899-1981) FOR HIS STORY-TELLING AND POETIC CONTRIBUTION TO DANISH ART. IT IS THE FIRST BIG MUSEUM EXHIBITION OF THE ARTIST’S WORKS SINCE 1981.*
In Danish art, Kay Christensen remained a loner possessed of a sublime sense of the expressiveness and material beauty of colour. He grew up in a cultured home, where his interest in art, music and poetry was awakened at an early age.
Throughout his career Kay Christensen drew inspiration from well-known elements in his immediate surroundings and his leading motifs were women and children, but in the course of the 1940s the boundaries between outer reality and the inner world of the artist grow increasingly blurred. His figures begin to resemble lyrical fairy-tale figures placed in a borderland between dream and reality. Like Marc Chagall, Kay Christensen sometimes let his figures float in space; among these the fairy-tale figure of Miriam, who for Kay Christensen became a recurrent symbol of beauty and happiness in life.
STORYTELLER AND PAINTER IN ONE
Kay Christensen was a storyteller both in his pictures and in his writings. Apart from illustrating the works of others, he often created his own synthesis of word and image, for instance in his large lithographic book Eventyret om Evigglæde og de fire Vinde (The Tale of Everlasting Joy and the Four Winds) (1948). The sensuous, poetic and untrammelled flow of words that characterises his sentences is transformed in his pictures into dreamlike images where the transition from background to foreground often merges into a light veil of small brushstrokes.
Kay Christensen was an artist in whom the genius of colour and poetry was vividly present and for whom the flowers of fairy tale unfolded on the canvas. His works are at once gay and melancholy, poetic and eerie. They all contain the eternal fairy tale.
KAY CHRISTENSEN CATALOGUE AND FILM
The exhibition KAY CHRISTENSEN – THE ETERNAL FAIRY TALE is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with new articles by Peter Michael Hornung, author and art historian; Dy Plambeck, author; Krass Clement, photographer and son of the artist; Minna Sevaldsen, MA, and Curator Maria Kappel Blegvad. With the collaboration of Staalfilm, ARoS has also made an adaption of Kay Christensen’s illustrated literary work Eventyret om Evigglæde og de fire vinde (The Tale of Everlasting Joy and the Four Winds) from 1948. The film is shown at the exhibition and takes us on a fairy-tale journey into the artist’s universe which is simultaneously colourful and sombre.
The Eternal Fairy Tale
28 September 2013 – 26 January 2014
THE EXHIBITION KAY CHRISTENSEN – THE ETERNAL FAIRY TALE PAYS HOMAGE TO THE DANISH PAINTER KAY CHRISTENSEN (1899-1981) FOR HIS STORY-TELLING AND POETIC CONTRIBUTION TO DANISH ART. IT IS THE FIRST BIG MUSEUM EXHIBITION OF THE ARTIST’S WORKS SINCE 1981.*
In Danish art, Kay Christensen remained a loner possessed of a sublime sense of the expressiveness and material beauty of colour. He grew up in a cultured home, where his interest in art, music and poetry was awakened at an early age.
Throughout his career Kay Christensen drew inspiration from well-known elements in his immediate surroundings and his leading motifs were women and children, but in the course of the 1940s the boundaries between outer reality and the inner world of the artist grow increasingly blurred. His figures begin to resemble lyrical fairy-tale figures placed in a borderland between dream and reality. Like Marc Chagall, Kay Christensen sometimes let his figures float in space; among these the fairy-tale figure of Miriam, who for Kay Christensen became a recurrent symbol of beauty and happiness in life.
STORYTELLER AND PAINTER IN ONE
Kay Christensen was a storyteller both in his pictures and in his writings. Apart from illustrating the works of others, he often created his own synthesis of word and image, for instance in his large lithographic book Eventyret om Evigglæde og de fire Vinde (The Tale of Everlasting Joy and the Four Winds) (1948). The sensuous, poetic and untrammelled flow of words that characterises his sentences is transformed in his pictures into dreamlike images where the transition from background to foreground often merges into a light veil of small brushstrokes.
Kay Christensen was an artist in whom the genius of colour and poetry was vividly present and for whom the flowers of fairy tale unfolded on the canvas. His works are at once gay and melancholy, poetic and eerie. They all contain the eternal fairy tale.
KAY CHRISTENSEN CATALOGUE AND FILM
The exhibition KAY CHRISTENSEN – THE ETERNAL FAIRY TALE is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with new articles by Peter Michael Hornung, author and art historian; Dy Plambeck, author; Krass Clement, photographer and son of the artist; Minna Sevaldsen, MA, and Curator Maria Kappel Blegvad. With the collaboration of Staalfilm, ARoS has also made an adaption of Kay Christensen’s illustrated literary work Eventyret om Evigglæde og de fire vinde (The Tale of Everlasting Joy and the Four Winds) from 1948. The film is shown at the exhibition and takes us on a fairy-tale journey into the artist’s universe which is simultaneously colourful and sombre.