Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen

This themed auction presents 10 works by Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, all from the artist's estate. Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen grew up in a culturally rich home in Birkeröd. In the 1920s, he studied both painting and sculpture, and in 1927, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. 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 became completely captivated by surrealism, which became a lifelong passion and his primary mode of expression.

The second part of this collection, featuring an additional 8 works, will be presented at the autumn live auction Modern Art & Design in November.

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This themed auction presents 10 works by Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, all from the artist's estate. Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen grew up in a culturally rich home in Birkeröd. In the 1920s, he studied both painting and sculpture, and in 1927, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. 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 became completely captivated by surrealism, which became a lifelong passion and his primary mode of expression.

The second part of this collection, featuring an additional 8 works, will be presented at the autumn live auction Modern Art & Design in November.

In February 1935, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen married the artist Elsa Thoresen, and during the rest of the 1930s, they lived in Paris, where they both devoted themselves to surrealism. Initially, they worked in an abstract style, but later shifted to a psycho-photographic form of surrealism, where a figure or object is depicted almost photographically but placed in a surreal, dreamlike, and imaginative context. In the late 1940s, Bjerke-Petersen's painting style changed, breaking with his previous approach as 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, and Paris in 1938 and 1947. In the mid-1940s, the couple moved to Sweden. Together with Elsa Thoresen, he exhibited at Färg och Form in Stockholm on several occasions and held numerous solo exhibitions at Swedish museums.

In 1951, he began a collaboration with Rörstrand Porcelain Factory, where he primarily worked on sketches and models. Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen had a broad repertoire; in addition to painting and ceramics, he created around 20 graphic works and wrote several art theory books and journals. He authored "Surrealismen" in 1934 and "Surrealismen Billedverden" in 1937, two books on surrealist art based on André Breton's theories presented in 1929 in "Le Surréalisme et la peinture." Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen died in Halmstad in 1957.