Oil painting by Rolf Gjedsted no. 1

Rolf Gjedsted (1947–2022) was a prolific and successful Danish writer and artist who spent much of his childhood and artistic career living in Copenhagen. The interrelatedness of culture and writing in his work is evident throughout his career: he was a regular contributor to Superlove, a magazine borne out of the youth culture of the late 1960s, as well as working as a broadcaster producing shows on painters and authors from Degas to Gauguin, Poe to Rimbaud. Gjedsted was a recipient of two prestigious Danish awards for writing: the Aarestrup Medal (1986) and the Drachmann Scholarship (1991).

Gjedsted’s artistic work saw a number of collaborations with fellow Danish artists. Through his writing he also encountered painters Wilhelm Freddie and Per Kirkeby, the designers for several of his book covers, and with Niels Reumert, with whom he collaborated on two separate lithographic works: ‘A Wall of Fish’ and ‘The Journey to America’. His sought-after 1968 collaboration with Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen rendered Jacobsen’s chairs in Gjedsted’s trademark abstract, colourful imagery. He exhibited across Denmark, most recently in a show with Wiliam Skotte Olsen at Galerie Knud Grothe in Copenhagen. From the 1980s, Gjedsted’s artistic output increased alongside his career as a poet, a connection that is felt strongly throughout his work.

This painting is no exception, with its expressive, free brush strokes and layered with bright paint splatters. Like the rest of his work, this piece uses bright and contrasting colours in a way that is strikingly modern. Its style even feels to distantly echo graffiti art in its vibrancy and the contouring created by darker and brighter tones placed next to one another. Like graffiti, Gjedsted’s painting sets up a visual language that is seen especially when put in the context of his broader artistic output, which has a compelling lyricism about it.