Provenance: Previously in the collection of Maurice Lefebvre-Foinets. Since by descent in the family of the present owner.

Richard Mortensen's role in the development of the Danish abstract painting is immeasurable. After a journey to Paris in 1947, where he became part of the circle of concrete artists connected to Galerie Denise Renée, his career took off in earnest. The 1950s became a landmark period for Mortensen's artistic oeuvre, and in 1951 he was one of the driving forces behind the exhibition “Klar Form” (Clear Form) in Denmark, which had the ambitious artistic project of defining the idiom of concrete painting: while large unbroken planes of colour and lines form the illusion of space, diagonals and sharp zigzag shapes create displacement, nerve and depth. Mortensen turns away from the figurative, but although his paintings from that point on exclusively refer to phenomena and objects within the frame, they never shut themselves off from the world entirely. On the contrary, to a great extent they deal with our perception of the world. What we see, feel, think and experience.

As Knud W. Jensen puts it: “Whether Morten expresses himself as an expressionist in the earlier work of the 30s and 40s or his talent and clear intellect later dictates him to paint in a seemingly more detached manner in logical constructive compositions, he remains one of the century's greatest painters. Now that we have a bit of distance to the 1950s, we see how he actually ran circles around most of his Parisian contemporaries with his abilities as a painter. ”

(Villads Villadsen and Jens Erik Sørensen, Richard Mortensen Paintings 1929–1993. Quote Knud W. Jensen p. 102)