artist: Frede Christoffersen (Danish 1919-1987)
medium: colour lithograph
dimensions: 76 x 61 frame size (approx)
limited edition 113/310
signed and dated 57
presented in new teak stained angled timber frame with archival backing and non-reflective UV glass
AU $1425 (approx US $935 / 805 EUROS / 144,000 yen / 710 GBP - for exact current conversion visit xe.com)
artist bio
Frede Christoffersen was born in Borup on 15 April 1919. He was a Danish painter, print maker and illustrator.
Christoffersen spent a short time at the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts but found it ill-fitting and signed on for long voyages to East Asia and to North and South America; drawings from those travels were published in 20 Smaa Sorte Tegninger (1941). On his return he enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended the graphic school in 1942 and the painting classes under Aksel Jørgensen and Vilhelm Lundstrøm in 1942–43. Early in his career he worked as an illustrator — among other commissions he illustrated Nis Petersen’s Digte (1942) and Ester Nagel’s Mennesker (1943) — but over time he turned increasingly to painting and the graphic arts as autonomous practices.
Christoffersen’s art is dominated by an obsessive, sustained investigation of the sun as motif: concentric luminous forms, after-images and the shifting colours of dawn, day and evening recur through his work. As a thirty-three-year-old he produced Aften, Lumsås (1952), a breakthrough painting whose bold, flat areas of yellow-green, yellow, reddish-brown, bright green and deep blue announced the signature chromatic language he would develop across decades. He also painted a number of night and moon pictures in deep, cool tones and explored foggy, grey landscapes and quarries; these themes are often read together with the personal history of his radiation treatment at the Finsen Institute, which influenced his investigations of light and its absence.
Major works that appear in museum records, literature and auction catalogues include Aften, Lumsås (1952); Solbillede (1954); Aften, Skagen (summer 1955); Det gamle fyrtårn (1955); a sequence of evening paintings produced through the late 1950s and 1960s often titled Aften or Evening (examples dated c.1956–1969 appear in public and commercial collections); Efterbillede/“Efterbillede” (1967); and later works such as Måne, Landskab i ustabil balance (April–May 1975). Many other smaller-format paintings, woodcuts, colour lithographs and book illustrations were made from the 1940s onwards; selected works by Christoffersen are held in public collections including Moderna Museet in Stockholm and all of the major Danish art museums.
Christoffersen was active in the Danish exhibition circuit: he became a regular exhibitor with Den Frie Udstilling from 1954 and showed work repeatedly at Vrå-udstillingen and the annual Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling; smaller solo and group shows and museum displays of his prints and paintings followed throughout his career and after his posthomously . He also undertook public and decorative commissions: notable examples are the wall decorations and mosaics executed for De Danske Spritfabrikker in Copenhagen (1956) and decorative work for Askov Højskole (c.1955–57), among other institutional commissions. Over his lifetime he received major Danish honours, being awarded the Eckersberg Medal in 1965 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1986.
Christoffersen’s practice combined the direct materiality and dense handling of paint with a lyric abstraction centred on radiance, contour and the interval between colour and dark. He worked in small and medium formats as well as larger mural and decorative scales, and alongside his paintings he produced a substantial output of prints, book illustrations and graphic works that document his earlier years as an illustrator and his ongoing interest in the linear, black-and-white image. His work is represented in public collections and remains the subject of exhibitions and scholarship in Denmark and beyond.
He passed away at the age of 68 in Humlebæk on 29 May, 1987.