Page 33 - Art at VIPERGEN Korr

Rita Kernn-Larsen: Untitled, undated. Oil on canvas, 50 x 35.5 cm.
Until a few years ago, the surrealist painter Rita Kernn-Larsen was all but forgotten in Danish art history. A series of solo exhibitions in 2018 brought her into the light again, and today she is just as recognized in Denmark as she was internationally in her lifetime. In 1929, Rita Kerrn-Larsen studied with the artist Fernand Léger in Paris, and it was here she first became acquainted with the surrealist movement. In Copenhagen, she was part of the artist association Linien, and even though she gained attention on the international art market, she was not widely known in Denmark. She exhibited particularly in England and in France, where she lived and worked most of her life. Her surrealist style is classic for the genre, where artists strive to visualize the subconscious, but after World War
II she changed her expression. From here, she orientated herself towards landscape painting and went through a higher and higher degree of abstraction along the way, until she arrived to a concrete expression, of which the work Untitled is an example. Here, the painting is made up of a series of colored fields, where the emphasis is on the composition and the internal balance.
Rita Kernn-Larsen (1904-1998, DK) studied at Statens Tegneskole in Oslo 1924-25, and in 1926 she began her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. In 1929, she became an apprentice with Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne in Paris. Rita Kernn-Larsen debuted with Chr. Larsen’s Kunsthandel in Copenhagen in 1934. She participated in the exhibition Cubism=Surrealism at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen in 1935 and in the exhibition Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938. During her lifetime she exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery, UK; The National Gallery of Art, DK; Museé cantonal des Beaux-Arts, FR; MoMA, US, and Randers Art Museum, DK. Since 2018, she has had a major retrospective breakthrough in Denmark, which has led to exhibitions at GL Strand, Gl. Holtegaard, the Kunsten Museum for Modern Art and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
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