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We are creating the Poul Gernes Catalogue Raisonné of • Films • Flags • Furniture and Design • Happenings • Illustrations • Installations • Objects • Paintings • Photos • Prints • Sculptures • Site Specific works • Works on Paper
If you own or have knowledge of any work by Poul Gernes, click
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Aase Seidler Gernes and Poul Gernes in Pietrasanta, 1995
The catalogue is an ongoing project documenting the artist’s entire corpus of work in each category. Accordingly, the catalogue will be published in 2022-23 at www.poulgernes.com.
The Poul Gernes Catalogue Raisonné is initiated and supported by the Klara Karoline’s Foundation founded by Aase & Poul Gernes. Since 2019 the project is led and carried out by art historian Bibi Henriksen Saugman. Additional supporters are 15. Juni Fonden, Beckett-Fonden, Erik Birger Christensens Fond and our digital partner Hello Monday.
About Poul Gernes
Poul Gernes was born on March 19, 1925 at Frederiksberg, Denmark. He was the son of shoe manufacturer Viggo and Ellen Gerner Nielsen. In 1943, when Poul Gernes was a lithograph’s apprentice, he met the textile-printer Aase Seidler (1927-2018). They married in 1948 and their children were born in rapid succession in the following years, up until 1965.
Aase was Poul’s faithful life companion and was just as much an artistic sparring partner as she was his wife. Artistically they cross-fertilized one another, reciprocally. The Poul Gernes ‘firm’ was the consignor. Poul Gernes considered himself and the activity of his decorating enterprise, in particular, to be a firm. Throughout the years the firm consisted of a number of varying persons, one of which, namely Aase and secondly their children were permanent members of.
From the mid 1950s and up until 1963 the family lived in a do-it-yourself house in Herlev, a Copenhagen suburb. Returning from an extensive journey around Europe and North Africa in a VW-van during 1963-64, the family settled under modest conditions in the countryside village of Ekeröd, near Örkelljunga, in southern Sweden.
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“A Doctor is there to repair a broken leg, a bicycle mechanic to mount a new crank, a woodworker to repair a broken chair leg. An artist is here to repair a broken moral.”
Poul Gernes, July 15 1962
Poul Gernes’ artistic concern was driven by a love for mankind and his artistic method took its starting point at a curious exploration of materials, colours, genres etc accelerated by the spirit of the time and the avant-garde movements. In October 1961 Poul Gernes and art historian Troels Andersen co-founded the avant-garde and cross-aestethic group The Experimental Art School (Eks-skolen) in Copenhagen, established as a reaction against the institutionalization of art practices embodied by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at the time. The Eks-skolen proved itself to having had a major influence on the Danish art scene during the 1960s and 70s.
In the last twenty years of his life and after the completion of his monumental interior design of the Herlev Hospital, which still remains the largest artistic decoration to date in Denmark, Gernes devoted his artistic practice mainly to making site specific decorations. Celebrating a return to decorative arts, his works communicated a strong belief that art is intended for everyone. It was a concern paid to folks’ welfare, to people’s well-being, that he cared about, and uncompromisingly sought ambitiously, to change in our built-up environments and everyday surroundings.
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In this sense, Poul Gernes was the welfare state’s staunch advocate and exequatur, par excellence, on the field of aesthetics. He and Aase dedicated their lives to re-allocating the aesthetic resources, so that they would not only be accruing to a few privileged people but would become a gift to all of us, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity and conditions. Clear colours, an easy-to-read motivic sphere, and an unsnobbish albeit immediate access to materials were central elements in this idea of aesthetic re-distribution by the Gernes enterprise.
Posthumously, Poul Gernes has received an ever-increasing international acclaim with notable solo exhibitions at Deichtorhallen (Hamburg) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk), to name a few and was included at the prestiguoes Documenta 12 in 2007. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Denmark (Copenhagen), Daimler Collection (Berlin), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Phillips Collection (Washington DC), among many others.
“I cannot do it alone
- want to join in?”
Poul Gernes, 1971