Hans Purrmann: The Vitality of Colour / Asger Harbou Gjerdevik: Driving Home for Christmas

Hans Purrmann was born in the southern German city of Speyer in 1880 and died in 1966 in Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition The Vitality of Colour presents his work in a retrospective hanging. Already during his lifetime, Hans Purrmann, who combined French modernism with German tradition, was appreciated by fellow artists and cultural personalities as a “great colourist.” In fact, as a painter and crossborder networker with life stations in Munich, Berlin, Paris, Florence and Switzerland, he was an important artist for the development of classical modernism. In the circle of the French bohemia, he was “massier” (foreman) of the Académie Matisse, became a highly reclaimed pupil of Matisse and found his very own way, characterized by colour intensity and equilibrium. In Germany, he was the “Frenchy,” in France, “L‘allemand.” When the National Socialists banned him as “degenerate,” he chose the Villa Romana in Florence as his place of refuge; in 1943, he fled to Montagnola in Switzerland.

Throughout his life, Hans Purrmann cultivated a lively exchange with personalities of the European cultural scene from Henri Matisse to Hermann Hesse. He was married to the artist Mathilde Vollmoeller. With him and many young artists from Scandinavia and all over the world, she had studied at the private Académie of Matisse and extended his influence in modernism.

The exhibition The Vitality of Colour presents the development of Hans Purrmann’s art from the early years in Germany through the Paris years and on to the mature oeuvre when he lived in Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Purr­mann was a dedicated cultural diplomat and European, just as he committed himself to creating the best conditions for art and artists in his circle of acquaintances. For that reason the exhibition also presents selected examples of works by other artists with whom he maintained strong ties—artistic as well as personal—through­out his life.

Also on view at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND

Asger Harbou Gjerdivik. Driving Home for Christmas
April 27–June 19, 2019

For his solo exhibition, Driving Home for Christmas, the London-based Danish artist Asger Harbou Gjerdevik has developed new paintings and sculptures which have evolved from his relationship with a 30-year-old, silver-grey Volvo 240. Gjerdevik had inherited the car but could not keep it nor bring himself to scrap it. The sculptures are created as assemblages involving deconstructed car parts and the composite compositions of the paintings are based on the flickering impressions that life and especially the journey in the Volvo from England to Denmark have left in the artist. For his highly collage-inspired compositions Gjerdevik has found inspiration in among others the beat artist Williams S. Burroughs’ cut up technique, Italian Proto-Renaissance painters like Giotto and Medieval frescos with their anti-hierarchical form.

Asger Harbou Gjerdevik (b. 1986) has trained at Central Saint Martins in London, and in 2017 he obtained an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. In recent years, he has attracted great attention for his works in which he embeds figurative as well as abstract scenes that open up on several levels. He touches on topics such as loneliness, loss, lust and longing, but also humour and curiosity, and he finds inspiration in literature, mythologies, popular cultural reality and everyday impressions.

The exhibition Asger Harbou Gjerdevik. Driving Home for Christmas will be shown at Kunstforeningen GL STRAND from April 27 to June 19, 2019. A public artist talk between Asger Harbou Gjerdevik and curator Pernille Fonnesbech will be held at GL STRAND on Sunday, April 28 at 2-3pm .