News
Foto: Yukie Mikawa
Timeless Minimalism in Tokyo
Keld Helmer-Petersen is represented in the first exhibition in Japan of the works of Poul Kjærholm: Timeless Minimalism. Keld Helmer-Petersen was a longtime friend of Poul Kjærholm, and they designed many exhibitions together. Their cooperation has an impact on both the design, the poster and the spirit of the exhibition. The exhibition period is June 29th - September 16th 2024, and the venue is Panasonic Shiodome Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Photo: Tomonori Sakon
The Photographic World of Keld Helmer-Petersen
Art historian Inger Ellekilde Bonde has written the first full introduction to the photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen, who in Denmark turned photography into an artform (in Danish only).
Exercises in seeing
The architect and friend Jørn Utzon has said of Keld Helmer-Petersen that after looking at his photographs, one would look with different eyes on our surroundings. Through his art, he let unprecedented connections between things appear in the immediate surroundings: a drainpipe, a fire escape, a crack in the asphalt, a reed stalk.
People rarely appear visibly in his photographs. But removing man from the image is not the same as removing the human aspect of it. The images bring forth imaginations and associations, and the author of the new book about Helmer-Petersen, Inger Ellekilde Bonde, has gone to the photographer's work as an 'exercise atlas in seeing'.
Photography as art in line with painting
From the early 1940s, Keld Helmer-Petersen was preoccupied with creating an imagery that moved beyond the limits of the traditional characteristics of photography. It was not reports, landscape images or portraits that attracted him, but the graphic and abstract effects that could arise from photographing a plant stalk, a pile of milk jugs, a gas station. In the most common and commonest things, Helmer-Petersen found remarkable elements. He insisted on photography as an artistic means of expression in line with painting and music and was a pioneering figure in Danish modernist photography.
The pulse of jazz and the city
Keld Helmer-Petersen brings rhythm, not least jazz, but also the stopped rhythm of machines, light signals, everyday repetitions, into his work. In 1959 he created 'XK on Funen', a 6-day 'experimental art college' together with the architect Verner Panton. Here Helmer-Petersen taught 'exercises' in a more 'rhythmic-organic method' with roots in disciplines from the Bauhaus School and from the Institute of Design in Chicago, where Helmer-Petersen studied and taught in 1950. The discoveries he made artistically as well as personally as he explored Chicago became crucial to the graphic photography he refined in the years to come. He continued to push the boundaries of photography until his death in 2013 and collaborated throughout his career with several architects, visual artists and writers.
Published by U Press (www.upress.dk), 147 p., richly illustrated (In Danish only).
DKK 199,95. ISBN: 978-87-93890-20-6 / E-book, DKK 150. ISBN: 978-87-93890-21-3
100 years and still young
Photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen would have been 100 years on August 23, 2020.
LFI (Leica Fotografie International) celebrates the date with an impressive notice on their blog.
Photo: KHP with his first Leica camera in 1940, age 20
Keld Helmer-Petersen at the Art Museum Brandts
Educator Mathias Rude gives a vivid review of a current exhibition of Keld Helmer-Petersen’s works at the Art Museum Brandts in Odense. The museum has the largest collection of original works of Keld Helmer-Petersen in Denmark. Production: Art Museum Brandts, 2020.
Seeing big things in the small... in all simplicity
Photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen meets sculptor Mette Ussing
The photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen would have turned 100 on September 23, 2020. The Banja Rathnov Gallery wants to celebrate this occasion with a combined exhibition with the sculptor Mette Ussing (born 1943). The two artists knew each other well and followed each other's work with respect and humility. Not because they are related, but perhaps because they both unite abstraction and concreteness in their work, in a pictorial way, with a common intrusive understanding of reality. That is why it makes sense to present them today in dialogue with each other. The exhibited works of Keld Helmer-Petersen has not been exhibited for a long time.
Place: Banja Rathnov Galleri og Kunsthandel, Studiestraede 14, Copenhagen K, August 21 – September 26, 2020.
Opening hours: Wednesday to Friday 12am-5pm, Saturday at 11am-3pm.
KHP: Winter’s Graphics, Copenhagen 1979.
Mette Ussing: Small unsoluble wooden knot, Copenhagen 2020.
KHP: Penlight traces, Copenhagen 1974.
Haunted by Significant Forms
The thesis Haunted by Significant Forms: Rhythm, Concretism and Abstraction in the Photography of Keld Helmer-Petersen 1940-1965 by Inger Ellekilde Bonde, PhD, has now been published and is available as a pdf-file (in Danish only).
The thesis maps and describes the artistic work of Keld Helmer-Petersen in context of the international subjective formalism in postwar photography and Danish concrete art.
The thesis presents significant new background knowledge through studies of Helmer-Petersen’s stay at the American Bauhaus, The Institute of Design, and his artistic collaboration and relation to Danish concrete artists. The archive of the photographer works as the pivotal point of the thesis, and it therefore comprises a large amount of published as well as unpublished texts and photographs by Helmer-Petersen.
The PhD-project was financed by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and was written at the University of Copenhagen in close cooperation with the Special Collections at the Royal Danish Library.
KHP: Blue Swimming Pool, El Pedregal 1950
Keld Helmer-Petersen:
Photographs 1941–2013
Seven decades of Keld Helmer-Petersen’s quietly pioneering abstract color photography
Denmark’s best-known photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen (1920–2013) published his first photobook, 122 Colour Photographs in 1948. His work was immediately notable for its inventive composition, which turned landscapes and buildings into abstract patterns, and for the photographer’s embrace of color at a time when only black-and-white photography was considered serious. When Life magazine reproduced several pages from the book in 1949, Helmer-Petersen’s vision found a wide, international audience for the first time. Helmer-Petersen’s style was experimental modernism tempered by a lyrical simplicity and a sense of keen, quiet observation. By isolating details and compressing visual space, the photographer turned the real world into vibrant, graphic pattern. “Keld Helmer-Petersen: Photographs 1941–2013” offers a full retrospective of the photographer’s masterful work over the course of seven decades. Each chapter is introduced with a short text by Helmer-Petersen himself, and publication concludes with an interview with the photographer conducted by Martin Parr.
Publisher: Strandberg Publishing, Copenhagen. Introduction by Mette Sandbye. Essay by Finn Thrane. Interview by Martin Parr.
New posters
Permild & Rosengreen has recently published two prints from the collection of Keld Helmer-Petersen. The ‘Staircase’ from 1942 is an example of Vintage Helmer-Petersen being both cool and modern. The ‘Winterstalks’ from the same year was originally used as a cover for a booklet, but turned upside down it gets a graphic expression of its own. Both posters can be purchased in different sizes and frames.
Falling Water
Experimental film in colour from 1971 by Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen (1920-2013). Photo/editing: Keld Helmer-Petersen. Music: Louis Hjulmand. Production: Minerva-Film.
Finding Beauty
The pioneer of Danish Art Photography Keld Helmer-Petersen. Finding Beauty is the first major retrospective exhibition of Held Helmer-Petersen’s work since 1990. It rests on research, originating from a PhD thesis on the art photographer, and it has been created in a close cooperation with his heirs. With Helmer-Petersen’s extensive archive as its point of departure – transferred to Royal Library in 2013 – key main works are introduced as well as specimen copies, diapositives, contact prints, drawings, collages, preparatory studies and films that have not previously been shown. The exhibition thus offers a new perspective on Helmer-Petersen’s work, illustrating his working process and history for the first time.
Place: The Royal Library, Copenhagen, June 14, 2019 – January 18, 2020
Photo: Anders Sune Berg.
Structures
In 2007, Keld Helmer-Petersen was appointed to decorate the Copenhagen Airport Station Kastrup with 2 x 16 large photographs. His works were presented in 2008 under the title 'Structurer', and they consist of motifs from several decades, all in black and white. The murals can still be seen to this day, so do not hesitate to visit the exhibition under the airport.
Place: Copenhagen Airport Station Kastrup, ongoing, free entrance day and night.
Photo: J. Helmer-Petersen