COPENHAGEN.- The National Gallery of Denmark, opened the exhibition Rising from Darkness, featuring a range of fine-art prints from the 1950s by Danish artists such as Jane Muus, Palle Nielsen, Svend Wiig Hansen and Dan Sterup-Hansen. Their art gives voice to the widespread fear of doom and disaster in the aftermath of World War II, but it also speaks of a dawning hope of a brighter future.

The 118 works featured in the exhibition Rising from Darkness are full of dark and dismal stories: they show how a group of Danish 1950s artists and printmakers saw the post-war years and the threat of an even more dreadful nuclear war. Most of all, their art reflects a deeply felt anxiety about the future of humanity. However, the artists also believed that art could – and should – contribute to greater awareness of the looming threat while also helping to bring about the basis for a better future for humankind. The bleak, gloomy timbre of the artworks is underpinned by a faith that humanity can rise again.

All of the twelve artists featured in this exhibition worked with the human figure and were interested in how man perceived and responded to the darkness of their times. Svend Wiig Hansen’s etching The Searchers from 1958 shows five human figures ambling aimlessly in a barren rocky landscape; a place where disaster has already struck. The scene eloquently expresses the insecurity and loneliness that many people felt in the years after World War II and during the early Cold War.

Some of the works featured in the exhibition apply a rather more optimistic perspective, choosing instead to focus on intimate relationships; on our relationship with our fellow man. Those works testify to the great emphasis on humanism evident in the 1950s; to the widespread will to once again have faith in humanity’s dignity and future. Jane Muus’s charmingly sympathetic depictions of ordinary people and Erling Frederiksen’s pictures of mother-and-child themes offer examples of how universal human conditions provide a stable platform that mankind can use to navigate by in a world infused by insecurity and doubt.

Humanity takes centre stage
The art responds to contemporary political issues and situations, but it never depicts or comments directly on specific events. Rather, it speaks of mankind’s emotional responses to such events. Humankind takes centre stage here – as figures and as subject matter. Such insistence on the human figure clearly conveys the artists’ faith in human dignity and the future of humanity.

The exhibition mainly comprises linocuts, etchings and woodcuts, focusing on the works of Palle Nielsen, Svend Wiig Hansen and Dan Sterup-Hansen while also including art by Aksel Jørgensen, Henry Heerup, Erling Frederiksen, Jane Muus, Per Ulrich, Eigil Wendt, Knud Nellemose, Albert Mertz and Gunnar Hossy.