HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN Impromptu

01. September 2013 to 12. January 2014

Hans Christian Andersen Christian Andersen (1805-75) is famous primarily for the fairy tales he wrote. And yet he left behind numerous drawings and as much as one thousand silhouettes. This exhibition presents for the first time photographic portraits of Hans Christian Andersen together with a selection of his silhouettes and drawings. A favourite of the European royal courts, Andersen was one of the most photographed figures of his time and a majority of the altogether 250 photographic portraits were taken at his own initiative. What all three forms of expression have in common is the immediacy and suddenness of the captured moment. The drawings convey episodic impressions of the artist’s travels, while the paper cutouts are products of the poet’s imagination. The photographic portraits, in turn, show an aloof, yet sensitive, unstable and nervous artist – a self-image that Hans Christian Andersen staged over and over again and restlessly spread throughout the world. As an important element of the exhibition, the Danish artists Ebbe Stub Wittrup (b. 1973) and Ulrik Heltoft (f. 1973) have produced a black and white film about Hans Christian Andersen’s silhouettes that animates the latter to create moving images. The exhibition is curated by the Danish photography historians Tove Thage and the artists in cooperation with the Museum Kunst der Westküste.