Ejler Bille

Ejler Bille, Ejler Bille , 6.3.1910-Danish painter, graphic artist, 01.05.2004, sculptor and poet.

 

 

As one of the pioneers of abstract painting in Denmark was Ejler Bille a 1900-t's most important Danish artists. He graduated from Birkerød State school, where in 1929 he met the painter v. Bjerke Petersen.

1930-31 he was a student at the Art-Craft shoe, where also Richard Mortensen went. Bille worked at this time with wooden sculptures and debuted at K.E. in 1931.

Together with Richard Mortensen he experienced on a trip to Berlin in the same year the current abstract art, especially the works of Kandinsky and Jean Arp. These impressions and getting together with Bjerke-Petersen, who had just returned from a year of study at  Bauhaus school in Germany, got in 1932 after just one semester to Bille to abandon Bauhaus.

In 1933, he held together with Bjerke-Petersen, his first exhibition and showed here also paintings. The sculptures revolved around an abstract expression, Maar (1931) and Walkers Form (1933/36, Statens Museum for Kunst). With a simple, symbolic characters character and color position reflected the paintings clearly the foreign pioneers Kandinsky, Hans Arp and Joan Miro.

 

 

 

Ejler Bille exhibited together from 1934 with Bjerke-Petersen and Richard Mortensen in the abstract-surrealist group Linien and they published a magazine of the same name. From ca. 1935 stood Mortensen and Bille in opposition to Bjerke-Petersen and Wilhelm Freddie, as they maintained that the surreal content had to be given a non-figurative design. 'S works prægedes after a stay in Paris in 1937 by a new and imaginative power similar to that in the years prior had dominated the sculptures.

 

 

"Komposition"  painted in Paris in 1938 (Holstebro Art museum), marks the spontaneous gesture and show's affiliation to the circle of expressive abstract artists in Denmark. The line held his last exhibition in 1939, and the following year became a member of the Beetle Corner  and Høstudstillingen. During the war years he took part in the work around the periodical  Helhesten and he painted a large number of "mask images". It is essential in this context that the mask as narrative and partly exotic motif no importance was given for Beetle, only as picture signs of surface.

Ejler Bille Picasso published in 1945. Surrealism. Abstract art, a collection of articles on contemporary art, also outside Europe. His insistence on the importance of an eternal art in contrast to modernism's idea of an increasingly avant-garde ratio tend towards a reorientation.

Inter alia took the Beetle after the two legendary Cobra exhibitions (1949 and 1951) distance from the movement's deliberately experimental and international trend, such as Jorn  profiled the. With such attitudes moved Beetle itself at certain points outside the beaten path in post-war Danish art.

 

 

He was thus in 1951 to form Marts Udstillingen, a circle of both abstract and figurative working artists. A clear natural spillover from the war years put its mark on both color and form awareness in his painting. His works from this time also got a strong rhythmic and arabeskagtig intensity, where they stand as image characters of reflective musical lightness.

 

 
 
Dylan's many foreign trips, in particular to the Mediterranean area and to East Asia (Bali) together with his wife, painter Agnete T., became increasingly a factor for him.

 

Journeys over the years have set themselves clear traces in his work, which also includes poems and graphic work and Commisions to, among other things. Danmarks Tekniske Højskole in Labrador (1966-68).

 

 

Other works can be seen on most Danish art museums. After the March the exhibition's resolution was Beetle in 1982 Member of den frie udstilling. He received the  Eckersbergs price   1960, Thorvaldsen medal 1969 and  Eugene medal    1987