Exhibited: Peggy Guggenheim's gallery “Guggenheim Jeune”, London 1938 (inscription on the stretcher). Exhibited: “Rita Kernn-Larsen. Malerier og tegninger fra 1930'erne” (Paintings and drawings from the 1930s), Sønderjyllands Kunstmuseum, Tønder, Denmark, 23 May - 16 June 1985, cat. no. 18 (stamped on the stretcher). Exhibited: “SOLO: Rita Kernn-Larsen”, Kunsten Aalborg and Gl. Holtegaard, Denmark, 2018–19, reproduced in the catalogue as cat. no. 1.35, p. 67. Provenance: Private collection, Denmark.

We are delighted to be able to offer no fewer than four very unique paintings by Rita Kernn-Larsen, which are a rare sight at auction these days. Kernn-Larsen has her debut in Copenhagen in 1934, and the press calls her “a female Danish Picasso”. Before that, she studies among other places at Statens Tegneskole in Oslo, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at the Académie Moderne under Fernand Léger. She thus spends the majority of her artistic life in Paris and then London, and she does not return to Denmark until the mid-1950s. Kernn-Larsen participates in several Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s and is associated with the circle surrounding the art group Linien. For many artists, Surrealism offers not only an experiment with style and technique, but also a change of attitude from the conventions of the bourgeoisie, and it is possibly this break with convention that several of the progressive female artists of the time finds so appealing. She often works with reflections on the “new woman”, a feminist ideal in relation to economic, gender and sexual emancipation, and three of the auction’s works from different stages of her Surrealist period are fine examples of this. The green-yellow composition is organic and abstract: two biomorphic forms floating in an indefinable space, bound together by a clear yellow circle, as an allegory of the union between man and woman at the moment of conception. “Dialogue” is executed in a broader palette. It is composed of more recognisable human figures which, combined with mismatched figures and automatic drawing, constitute a classic Surrealist work. “Awakening” is a beautiful example of her motifs with trees and women in a total symbiosis, as a symbol of the sensual, playful and intuitive. During the war, Kernn-Larsen lives in London, where she experiences its many horrors and the bombings at close range. As a consequence, she seeks new artistic paths and settles in the South of France, where the yellow-green colours of nature, the vineyards and the everyday life around her becomes sources of inspiration for her painting. From the 1960s onwards, she works more abstractly in painting and collage form, but then shares the fate of so many of her female colleagues and is all but forgotten about. In recent years, Rita Kernn-Larsen has made a serious comeback on the art history agenda. She has been shown at several exhibitions, including “SOLO” in 2019, at which two of the auction’s works were represented.