Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt: 50 years of sharing dreams through art

By Signe Hansen

In the heart of Jutland lies a place where art, fantasy and architecture merge with captivating results. In 2026, Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum in Herning celebrates its 50th anniversary with a programme centred on accessibility – from unseen works and a travelling exhibition to a new sound installation created together with local people with disabilities and mental health challenges.

Even before stepping inside, visitors at the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum are greeted by spectacular colour displays and immersive art experiences. Created by Carl-Henning Pedersen, the museum’s mosaic facade and vast ceramic mural transcend the boundaries between art, exterior and architecture.

UNKNOWN KNOWN. Photo: Tom Laursen

For museum director Lotte Korshøj, the museum’s anniversary is an opportunity not only to look back, but to return to the founding idea behind the museum. “The strongest thing about the museum is still Carl-Henning Pedersen’s burning wish for art to go out and live,” she says. “He believed that art has an important role to play in society, but for it to have that role, it has to be accessible where people are.”

That ambition runs through the entire anniversary year. It is present in A Gift to the People, where 67 works by Carl-Henning Pedersen are shown to the public for the first time, in the museum’s work to make its collection and archives digitally available, and in the new immersive sound work UNKNOWN KNOWN, which gives space to voices rarely heard in art institutions.

A Gift to the People. Photo: Tom Laursen

Dreams cannot be sold

Created as part of the post-war COBRA movement, the vivid, imaginative works of Pedersen and Alfelt continue to resonate far beyond Denmark’s borders. The two artists met in Elsinore in the early 1930s and married shortly after. It was Alfelt who introduced Pedersen to painting, and together they developed unique yet complementary artistic languages.

Pedersen became known for his colourful, spontaneous works populated with fantastical figures, animals and symbols. His style was deeply rooted in the idea that art should spring from the subconscious and the free imagination. Else Alfelt, meanwhile, was inspired by nature and spirituality, creating luminous, poetic works of mountains, stars and inner landscapes.

Etruskisk pige, 1980, by Carl-Henning Pedersen. Photo: Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum

Founded in 1976, the museum was created thanks to Carl-Henning Pedersen’s wish to donate his art to the public. In the 1960s, he offered 1,000 of his works to any municipality willing to build a museum around them. When Else Alfelt passed away before its opening, her works were added to the collection, forming a unique artistic dialogue between the two.

Today, the museum houses more than 6,000 works by Pedersen and Alfelt, all intended for popular enjoyment rather than exclusive exhibitions. Pedersen once said that one cannot sell one’s dreams. “For him, it was important that there was no equal sign between economy, market forces and making art,” explains Korshøj. “He did not create for anyone else, and he did not want others to tell him what to make more of because it sold well. I think it almost physically hurt him to sell his works.”

Instead, he imagined something closer to libraries for art: places where works could circulate, be experienced, returned and shared. A Gift to the People carries that idea forward by bringing hidden works back into public life.

Museum director Lotte Korshøj. Photo: Kenneth Stjernegaard

A gift from the archives

Opening in 2026, the exhibition presents 67 previously unseen works by Carl-Henning Pedersen – paintings that had been packed away for decades. The great number of works that still remain unseen is both astonishing and revealing. Pedersen painted almost obsessively throughout his life and, according to Korshøj, could create up to five works a day. Eventually, the sheer number of paintings became impossible to accommodate. Works were taken off their stretchers, rolled, stacked and stored, partly because the artist found it difficult to part with them.

“There are a thousand stories you could tell in connection with an anniversary,” says Korshøj. “But what I find interesting is that the place where Carl-Henning stood, surrounded by all those works, is in many ways where we still stand today. There are still stacks of works that have not seen the light of day.”

The works have been registered, photographed and carefully treated by conservators. Some bear signs of time and storage, yet that vulnerability is part of their story.

Voices from the unknown

The anniversary year also expands the idea of access through sound. UNKNOWN KNOWN is an immersive sound work created by musicians Lars Greve and Lis Raabjerg Kruse from Resonerende Rum in close collaboration with local people with disabilities and mental health challenges. Installed in the Angli courtyard, the work enters into direct dialogue with Pedersen’s monumental ceramic relief, surrounding visitors with a 360-degree sound universe under the open sky.

For Korshøj, the project continues the same line of thought that shaped the museum’s founding. Pedersen’s mural was originally given to shirt manufacturer Aage Damgaard’s Angli factory on the condition that it should remain publicly accessible.

“With UNKNOWN KNOWN, accessibility becomes more than physical access,” says Korshøj. “It is also about who gets the opportunity to mirror themselves in art, and who is allowed to be heard. Here, citizens from the disability and psychiatry area are given the microphone and the space they deserve.”

The response has already been strong. At the launch, some of the participants performed with the musicians in the courtyard. “There was a calm that settled over them while they were part of the work,” says Korshøj. “For those of us who experienced it, it was deeply moving.”

Art travelling out into the world

The museum’s anniversary is also marked beyond Herning. Around 150 works from the collection can currently be experienced in Dimensionen der Freiheit at Kunsthalle St. Annen in Lübeck, Germany. The exhibition opened last year at Kunstsilo in Kristiansand, Norway, under the title Cosmic Dimensions, and is part of a five-year travelling exhibition that brings Pedersen and Alfelt to international audiences.

With works by both Pedersen and Alfelt, the exhibition situates their artistic partnership within a wider European context and underscores the continued relevance of COBRA’s vision of freedom, imagination and artistic exchange across borders.

For the museum, the travelling exhibition is another expression of its founder’s intention. “It makes no sense for 6,000 works to remain in our basement,” says Korshøj. “They have to go out and live.”

Photo: Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum

Web: www.chpeamuseum.dk
Facebook: Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum
Instagram: @linka.neumann

Facts

Carl-Henning Pedersen (1913-2007) and Else Alfelt (1910-1974) were key figures in Danish modernism and the international COBRA movement.

The Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt Museum opened in Herning in 1976 and today houses more than 6,000 works by the two artists.

In 2026, the museum celebrates its 50th anniversary with accessibility as the central theme.

The anniversary exhibition A Gift to the People presents 67 previously unseen works by Carl-Henning Pedersen.

The sound work UNKNOWN KNOWN is installed in the Angli courtyard, in dialogue with Pedersen’s monumental mural Imagination’s Play around the Wheel of Life.