Sun and Moon
The graphic works of Henry Heerup and Julie Nord
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With Henry Heerup, the graphic arts experienced an enormous flourishing in the 20th century. His popular graphic works can be experienced this autumn side by side with one of contemporary art’s great innovators of graphic art, Julie Nord, when the Heerup Museum shows the exhibition SUN AND MOON.
The original drawing is Julie Nord’s primary medium, but she has consistently worked alongside the graphic print. Her entire graphic production, which is often created in collaboration with Edition Copenhagen, including three completely new lithographs created in the summer of 2023, she shows together for the first time at the exhibition. This happens in a lively dialogue with a larger selection of Heerup’s graphic works consisting of lithographs and linoleum cuts from the museum’s collection. They have been selected together with Julie Nord based on common interests, but also include works that have surprised Nord and show sides of Heerup that few people may know about.
Over the past two decades, Julie Nord (b. 1970) has exhibited widely both in Denmark and abroad, where her special detailed and adventurous drawing style, often wrapped in an atmosphere of slight horror and horror, has caused great excitement from the beginning. At first glance, Heerup and Nord’s works may appear to be completely different – like sun and moon. Compared to Heerup’s simple, colorful and cheerful motifs, which capture life, everyday life and the many forms of love, Nord’s detailed motifs, which stylistically draw inspiration from 19th-century illustrated children’s books, glossy images and tattoo aesthetics, seem full of contrasts. But as sun and moon have always stood in a mutual relationship with each other, Heerup’s and Nord’s practices, despite their differences, are also connected on a fundamental level. Nord’s works show cracks in the culture of perfection that dominates modern life – an ideal that Heerup opposed in both his life and his art. The imagination, the fascination of the child’s world, a symbol-laden pictorial universe and the fondness for patterns are other common artistic features, which are displayed in the exhibition through the visual richness and narrative joy of the graphic works.