HUMLEBAEK.- The exhibition series Louisiana on Paper shows graphic works and drawings as well as other works on paper.

The new exhibition in the series, Into the World, to be shown in the period 17 January - 28 April 2019, focuses on a pioneering figure in feminist art in Denmark, Dea Trier Mørch (1941-2001), and it is the first museum exhibition of the artist’s graphic work viewed as visual art. The artist’s family, who handle her archive today, have generously made the exhibition’s c. 90 works available – works with a focus on the period 1967-77, when graphics played a major role in Dea Trier Mørch’s artistic activities. Most of the works have rarely been exhibited before.

Present-day view of an artist
Although Dea Trier Mørch’s writing is known to many people – especially from the generation of the 1960s – and although as a member of the artists’ collective ‘Røde Mor’ (Red Mother) she has achieved broad popular recognition of specific artistic motifs, her graphic production still remains relatively undescribed in a visual-art context.

The exhibition Into the World thus enables a new gaze at an artist’s oeuvre. Dea Trier Mørch’s linocuts range motivically from intimate depictions of childbirth and everyday life – with a distinctive body-oriented activism and feminist touch – to political subjects depicting political prisoners and freedom fighters, with the strong human portrait at the centre. The works show Dea Trier Mørch as a humanist and social realist. She turns her gaze to the childbearing mother, the newborn child, the new father, the senior citizen, the worker, the cleaning woman in the hospital, the freedom fighter and the young soldier.

At this distance from her own time, it is the humanist character of the work and her faith in the value and legitimacy of the individual that are striking. The links between the intimate, close life and the political currents of the time are part of an overall project, which aims to get art out into life and into the world.

Dea Trier Mørch
At the early age of 16 Dea Trier Mørch began studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, but she never felt at home in a course of education where abstract painting and the related role of the artist in the late 1950s took centre stage. On journeys and Academy trips to Eastern Europe, she found inspiration in poster art and experimental theatre, which opened up a path to a more democratic, reality-depicting art; so the print and especially the linocut became her medium.

Dea Trier Mørch returned to Denmark in 1968 and the following year she co-founded the artists’ collective ‘Røde Mor’, which had a political edge that combined visual art, rock music and theatre. Dea Trier Mørch’s linocut, as a quickly executed pictorial form with strong, contrast-filled motifs, was well suited to duplication in posters and other printed matter and gave the work of the whole group a striking visual impact.

In time, the graphic work became closely associated with Dea Trier Mørch’s work as an author, which to a high degree comes alive in the interaction between text and the few but powerful images. With a starting point in the novel Vinterbørn (Winter’s Child) from 1976, Dea Trier Mørch created a number of series of everyday life pictures in linocut, which stand as an important artistic contribution in their own right. With images of childbirths and childbearing women, Dea Trier Mørch brought a brand new dimension to a visual culture where this universal human condition had remained amazingly unexplored. While death is a widespread theme in visual art, the beginning of life is a motif that only attracted greater artistic attention with the advent of feminism. Dea Trier Mørch’s works are by no means afraid of getting to grips with the body as the point of departure for the human condition.

There is an air of respect in her pictures from the maternity ward, in which the women’s perspective comes to the fore. We find the same dignity in her graphic works with their images of the time, where the emphasis is on the social and the collective, and where everyday life becomes the gateway to reflections on life – from birth to death.