Page 63 - Art at Mayfair Tunneln

Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen: Untitled, 1946.
Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm.
“I try to paint the balance between utopia and reality and to remove the boundaries between wishes and realities.” The words are those of the artist Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen who in his afterlife has received great attention for his abstract
and figurative surrealistic paintings. His practice also consisted of creating exhi-bitions, drawing, collage, graphics, public commissions, and text works such as poetry, articles, and papers on art theory, pedagogy, and political themes. Bjerke Petersen studied in Oslo, Paris, and the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany. Here he was taught by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. He preserved his international perspective and in 1933-34 he was a member of the Danish artist associa-tion “Linien” that also included artists such as Asger Jorn, Henry Heerup, and Sonja Ferlov Manco-ba. The group had an international network of artists. Bjerke Petersen was very strongly inspired by the surrealist movements that not only wished for a free approach to human life, its unfolding, and the art but was also driven by political agendas that suggested a new perception of art as anti-elitist and as a force of change in all facets of life. The surrealism that Bjerke Petersen created, was espe-cially surface-oriented painting where symbolic, organic, and abstract shapes were mixed with mys-terious scenarios. Surrealism’s ideas about how human consciousness contains more than what we are aware of, and that dream-inspired and symbolic expressions can provoke an expression of true reality and reveal information on the human condition were also Bjerke Petersen’s standpoint.
The entire time, there is a search towards the connection between humans and art and an endeavor to portray a joined life force and reality.
Vilhelm Bjerke Petersen (1909, DK) studied at the Art Academy in Oslo in 1927-29, and throughout his stu-dent years, he also had residencies in Paris in 1929 and at Bauhaus in 1930-31 where he was taught by Wassi-ly Kandinsky and Paul Klee. He was a founding member of the artist association Linien in 1934 and 1935, he, André Breton, and Max Ernst arranged the international exhibition kubisme=surrealisme at The Free Exhibi-tion, DK. He founded Moderne Konsthögskolan in Stockholm in 1948. He created a series of groundbreaking exhibitions and participated himself
at exhibitions in the US and Europe. He published several books on art theory and in 1935-36, he also published the journal Konkretion. In 2021, Bjerke Petersen’s collected works were exhibited at Øregaard Museum DK and Mjellby Art Museum, SE.
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