Page 63 - Art at Mayfair Hotel Tunneln

Rita Kernn-Larsen: Untitled, 1957.
Rita Kernn-Larsen was a Danish surrealist artist who in her lifetime achieved great international recognition and in retrospect has had a great comeback on the Danish art scene. As a young art student, she moved to Paris in 1929 where Fernand Léger became her teacher at his school Académie Moderne. Here, she got impressions from the surrealist movement which her works became strongly influenced by. She was part of the Danish artist association Linien
in Copenhagen and even though she did not receive much recognition in Denmark during her lifetime she was part of several highly estimated exhibitions internationally. She had major breakthroughs in especially France and England, and she lived and worked in those two countries during most of her life. She worked with surrealist painting until the Second World War. In her surrealist period, she came to exhibit with artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Méret Oppenheim. After the Second World War, she changed her artistic expression. It was at the same time she moved to the south of France and her works were shaped by the surrounding landscape and later by a more concrete approach to painting. The work Untitled is representative of Kernn-Larsen’s late period when her motives became nonfigurati- ve and where she more than earlier focused on the painting’s surface. Despite the work being abstract in its image language, some elements seem nature-oriented regarding color and surface texture.
Rita Kernn-Larsen (1904-1998, DK) studied at the National Drawing School in Oslo 1924-25, and in 1926 she started studying at The Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. In 1929, she became a student of Fernand Léger at Académie Moderne in Paris. Kernn-Larsen had her debut at Chr. Larsen’s Art Shop in Copenhagen in 1934. She participated at the exhibition Kubisme=Surrealisme at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen in 1935 and at the exhibition Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938. In her lifetime, she exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery, UK; The National Museum of Art, DK; Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, FR: MoMa, US; Randers Art Museum, DK. During the last five years, she has had a great retrospective breakthrough in Denmark which has led to exhibitions at GL Strand, Gl. Holtegaard, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
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