Ejnar Nielsen Catalog UK

Authors:
Charlotte Christensen
Ellen Egemose & Jacob Wamberg
Signe Havsteen
Peter Nørgaard Larsen
Camilla Klitgaard Laursen
Teresa Nielsen

Of all Danish artists active around the year 1900, Ejnar Nielsen (1872–1956) is the one who most directly and bluntly responded to fundamentally existential, yet at the time taboo subjects such as illness, poverty, disability, loneliness, life and death. His works dating from his years in the central Jutland village of Gjern, for which he left Copenhagen as a young artist in 1894, show a particular focus on these themes. Here he painted graveyards, terminally ill tuberculosis-stricken young people, funeral scenes set in beautiful landscapes, coffins and scenes of hell. His monumental paintings are often peopled by individuals of a kind who only rarely find their way into art: blind people, the poor, the sick and people whose lives are consigned to the fringes of society.