Helle-Vibeke Erichsen (12 January 1940 – 5 March 2016) was a Danish artist who created caricatures of people she met, initially in the form of etchings and woodcuts. From 1984, she specialized in painting.

Biography

Born in

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

on 12 January 1940, she was the daughter of the artist Børge Erichsen and his wife Dorit Sørensen. After a year at Robert Askou Jensen's art school, she studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under the painter

Søren Hjorth Nielsen Søren Hjorth Nielsen (2 August 1901 – 7 July 1983) was a Danish painter and illustrator. He is remembered for his paintings of the allotments and outskirts of Copenhagen and later for his landscapes of the Bramsnæs Vig area in northwestern Zeal ...

and the graphic artist Holger J. Jensen (1959–66). Her strange depictions of the people she met bear more resemblance to the works of

Jane Muus Mary Jane Crafoord Muus (10 June 1919 – 12 July 2007) was a Danish painter and illustrator. Most of her works portray people, either in portraits or walking about on streets or market places in foreign countries. She is remembered above all for h ...

than to those of her teachers at the Academy. Some of her graphical works were sketched on the spot but most were created on the basis of memory. Her paintings reveal her keen powers of observation, leading to often comical renderings of people in streets and cafés, carefully and colourfully depicted in acrylics. The painter Kjeld Heltoft commented: "In almost all her pictures, the composition is based on a relationship between people, stairs, windows and doors" leading to "a fully personal pictorial world in which the fragility of the figures contrasts with a solid interior or the heavy stones of a wall." Erichsen began to exhibit at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition in 1940. Her works can be found in the Royal Collection of Graphic Art in Copenhagen, at

Aalborg Aalborg (, , ) is Denmark's fourth largest town (behind Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Odense) with a population of 119,862 (1 July 2022) in the town proper and an urban population of 143,598 (1 July 2022). As of 1 July 2022, the Municipality of Aalb ...

Kunsten KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art is located in Aalborg, Denmark, on Kong Christians Allé near its junction with Vesterbro. Of a modern Scandinavian design, it was built between 1968 and 1972 by Finnish architects Elissa and Alvar Aalto and Danish a ...

and in the art museums of Southern Jutland,

Vejle Vejle () is a city in Denmark, in the southeast of the Jutland Peninsula at the head of Vejle Fjord, where the Vejle River and Grejs River and their valleys converge. It is the site of the councils of Vejle Municipality ('' kommune'') and the R ...

, Randers, Skive and in the

Kastrupgård Kastrupgård is a former manor house in Kastrup, a suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark. Dating from the mid 18th century, it is now a museum housing the Kastrupgård Collection (''Kastrupgårdsamlingen'') of modern art, which is owned and operated by ...

collection. Helle-Vibeke Erichsen died in Copenhagen on 5 March 2016.

Published works

References

External links

Works by Helle-Vibeke Erichsen on Artnet
{{DEFAULTSORT:Erichsen, Helle-Vibeke 1940 births 2016 deaths Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts alumni 20th-century Danish painters Danish etchers 20th-century Danish illustrators 21st-century Danish illustrators Danish women illustrators Danish women artists Danish caricaturists Women caricaturists 20th-century Danish women artists 20th-century Danish artists 20th-century Danish printmakers Women etchers