Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen grew up in a cultural home in Birkeröd. In the 1920s he trained in both painting and sculpture and was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo in 1927. In 1930 he went to the Bauhaus School in Dessau, where he had the opportunity to study under Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Their influence was significant for the young artist, but a few years later he was completely absorbed by the Surrealist movement, which became a lifelong passion and his main form of expression.
In February 1935, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen married the artist Elsa Thoresen and between October 1937 - March 1938 they lived in Paris, where they both devoted themselves to Surrealism, initially with an abstract idiom, but later with the psychophotographic form of Surrealism, in which a figure or object is reproduced almost photographically, but placed in a context that is unreal, dreamlike and imaginative. In the late 1940s, Bjerke-Petersen's painting changed, a stylistic break occurred and he returned to abstract, concrete painting. He exhibited at many important Surrealist exhibitions, for example in Copenhagen in 1935, London in 1936, New York in 1936, Paris in 1938 and 1947. In the mid-1940s, the artist couple moved to Sweden. Together with Elsa Thoresen, he exhibited at Färg och Form in Stockholm on several occasions and had many solo exhibitions in Swedish museums.

In 1951 he began a collaboration with Rörstrands Porslinsfabrik, where he mainly produced sketches and models. Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen had a broad repertoire: in addition to painting and ceramics, he produced some 20 graphic works and wrote several art theory books and journals. He wrote ‘Surrealism’ in 1934 and ‘Surrealismen billedverden 1937’, two books on surrealist art based on André Breton's theories, which he presented in 1929 in ‘Le Surrealisme et la peinture’. Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen died in 1957 in Halmstad.