SPECTA

Over the summer, SPECTA presents a series of works by Poul Pedersen.

The painter Poul Pedersen painted letters. Poul Pedersen originally worked as a house and sign painter, but in the 1960s he became part of a group of avant-garde artists in Aarhus and began working as an artist. One of Poul Pedersen's absolute masterpieces is The Stolen Alphabet. Over a number of years, Poul Pedersen sought out famous paintings to – at times with great public attention – copy letters onto a canvas. An A from a painting by Picasso, an H from Robert Rauschenberg, a P from Mondrian, a Q from Asger Jorn, etc. 24 years after starting this theft, Poul Pedersen completed the series, 25 letters, and he then donated the entire The Stolen Alphabet to the State Library in Aarhus, DK. As Poul Pedersen said, the painters had stolen the letters from the writers, and now he had stolen them from the painters and sent them back to live among the books.

In his work Fowal (2013), Poul Pedersen has quoted from the Danish poet Johannes V. Jensen’s poem from 1906 with the same title. Each letter is painted on its own canvas - a total of 36 canvases - and the typography is from his own The Stolen Alphabet.

Poul Pedersen was born in Denmark, but lived and worked in Paris since the 1970s. He was a member of the Danish artists association Den Frie.
From 1996, Poul Pedersen received the Danish Arts Foundation's Honorary Grant, and in 2007 he was awarded the Eckersberg Medal and in 2020 the Thorvaldsen Medal, both awarded by the Academy Council.
Poul Pedersen was represented by SPECTA for more thsn 30 years.

Poul Pedersen passed away at the end of February 2026, at the age of 92.

Throwback to 2004:

"YOU ARE HERE"
When an architect presents an idea for a building, a scale model is typically used to demonstrate the architectural concept. The interplay between context and form defines the architectural model, and people play only a secondary role.

"You Are Here" turns the purpose of the architectural model upside down. Instead of focusing on the building and its relationship to the surroundings, the model concentrates on the building's occupants, and their lives are exhibited in 220 consecutive windows.

The figures in the building are inspired by pictograms - stereotypical figures in stereotypical apartments - normally used in architecture to represent direction, "WC", "dining", "parking", etc.
In "You are here", these pictograms no longer represent the purely formal and abstract; instead, they create a series of highly personal characters that unfold all facets of human nature, good and bad.

"You are here" is a drama that mixes the uneventful everyday with the absurd, with humor and seriousness, love and death. The underlying idea of the installation comments on or critiques the convention that the architectural model should be devoid of life and inhabited by sterile, odorless robots. By utilizing the same architectural language with cheerful exaggeration, the artwork reveals a building inhabited by flesh-and-blood human beings.

Remembering both Lars Arrhenius and Jens Holm today, both of them are very missed..

The installation "You Are Here" was made by artist Lars Arrhenius and architect Jens Holm. It was one of 7 exhibitions in the exhibition project Box 2.0 - Art and Archtecture in collaboration, 2004-05.

📸 by Anders Sune Berg

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