Established 2002

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Else Fischer-Hansen (1905-1993), who was never a student at the Academy of Fine Arts, only found out that she wanted to paint when she was about 20 years old. At the time, she had tried a little bit of everything and wanted to be a weaver for a time, while her father wanted her to train as a translator in French. Instead, she decided to become a painter and traveled to Italy, where she studied painting for a year. Then she went to croquisskole in Nice to learn drawing. In 1928, she painted some pictures that she sent to the Artists' Autumn Exhibition. The pictures were accepted, and in the following years she exhibited regularly at the same place.

Already in the mid-1930’s, Else Fischer-Hansen chose to leave naturalistic painting to work in an abstract idiom, inspired by nature. In 1936 she began painting what she called “psychological pictures”, i.e. abstractions based on a landscape or a piece of music. This development was based on the fact that she was hospitalized for a year and a half due to a serious illness. Here she felt excluded from everything and had to use her imagination in abstracting drawings. But in the picture Komposition, 1931-33, which was exhibited at the Artists' Autumn Exhibition in 1933, you can see that she already worked mainly with color impressions, without directly recognizable motifs. On the other hand, on Figure composition from the same exhibition, you can still glimpse two girl profiles on a colored background. The painting Onsdag, 1941, consists of three ovals that can resemble heads, while Komposition, 1946, is a mosaic of color fields without the initiating motif. Although most of Else Fischer-Hansen's pictures seem completely abstract, they are most often based on reality, for example a hot afternoon with rain, when the air is penetrated by heavy humidity, or drizzle in autumn. It is these atmospheric impressions, the weather and the light, which form the basis of many of her paintings, not as recording observations, but as emotional experiences. She translated her sensory impressions and memories into a poetic vision of shapes and colors. Some of the images have a very special lightness, the colors can appear transparent, almost immaterial. In other works, on the other hand, you find an explosion of strong colors. In some works, the initiating motif can be recognized: the city with its accumulation of greatly simplified houses and roofs or the sea view with the water, the sky and the sun, as she could experience at her house in Rågeleje. Other images consist exclusively of an interplay of color fields or color strokes as in a piece of music. Her joy of color gives associations to some of the French painter H. Matisse's pictures, while other works may resemble the intimate and poetry-filled universe of the Swiss P. Klee with delicate and refined shades of color.

In the 1940s, Else Fischer-Hansen was close to many of the artists who later became associated with the international artists' association Cobra. She thus participated in the famous Tent Exhibition at Dyrehaven in 1941, for which she painted the exhibition's abstract round sign. In the tent exhibited i.a. Else Alfelt, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, Asger Jorn and her spouse, the gifted and sensitive colorist Egon Mathiesen, whom she had married in 1931. In 1946 she was a guest at the Autumn Exhibition, and the following year she participated in the exhibition Abstract Art in Denmark. 1950-54 she was a guest at Grønningen. It wasn't until many years later, in 1980, that she joined the Colorists, an association that suited her great coloristic talent and poetic sensibility. She had separate exhibitions several times, often together with her husband, including in the Art Association in 1957 and at Sønderjylland's Art Museum in 1975. Else Fischer-Hansen has carried out several abstract decorations, including a ceramic decoration 1959 at Crome and Goldschmidt's main entrance on Strøget, consisting of bright, sliding color rhythms, and 1968-71 a large color mosaic for Copenhagen County Hospital in Herlev. Else Fischer-Hansen also wrote the children's book Fut-Fut, 1937. She received several honors, including. Eckersberg's Medal 1979 and Thorvaldsen's Medal 1986. A number of her paintings can be found in Danish museums across the country.