Exhibited: ”Høstudstillingen”, Den Frie Udstillings Bygning, Copenhagen, 1947, cat. no. 8. Provenance: Private collection, Denmark.

Else Alfelt belongs among the experimental art pioneers who, from the 1930s and onwards, brought abstract art into the spotlight in Denmark. Although she began painting at a very young age, she never received any formal education since her original application to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was rejected.

Alfelt made her debut at The Danish Artists’ Autumn Exhibition in 1936, and from this point on she was an integrated part of the period’s pioneering artists that made their distinctive marks on Danish art history. In 1941, she participated in the artist group Helhesten's famous Tent Exhibition at Bellevue and also participated in the Autumn Exhibition in 1946. She was also one of the CoBrA movement's few female members.

When someone like Alfelt dreams of mountains, but that person is born in a country like Denmark, then there is only imagination to fall back on, and Alfelt therefore paints mountains before she experiences them in real life. Although her works take on the shape of striving mountain peaks already in the 1940s, it is only after the war that Alfelt visits Swedish and Norwegian Laponia: “I think mountains act as a border between the real and the unreal, it is the place where heaven and earth meet”, as she expresses it in an interview with Virtus Schade in 1955. The encounter with this type of nature truly liberates Alfelt's colouristic and lyrical talent, and moods of nature then became a dominant source of inspiration and driving force in her work - as in the fantastic painting from the very north of Scandinavia, we are offering at this auction.