When Keld Moseholm turned 80 in 2016, Faaborg Museum marked the occasion with the exhibition “Life’s Works”. The museum’s director Gertrud Hvidberg Hansen contributed to the catalogue with a description of Keld Moseholm’s garden and studio – beautifully situated by the South Funen archipelago – and wrote among other things:
“The whole is an overwhelming experience and a magnificent sight, and one asks oneself whether it can really be true that the many works were created by a single artist. But they were!”
One does not have to spend long with Keld Moseholm to understand how one person created all this art: He is always working. He thinks, he draws, he models – and around him swarm naturalistic children and women, small fat men who throw themselves into the most hair-raising situations that can never end well… or can they? Moseholm does not reveal how the story ends… it is permitted to hope for the best. And if one knows one’s biblical stories, it often helps lighten the whole thing…
Gertrud Hvidberg Hansen describes his visual language as contemporary and shaped by the art and aesthetics of the twentieth century, but the narratives and moral values that underpin the works are timeless and universal.
Power, inflated self-images and evil
“Keld Moseholm began his career with a series of empathetic and poetic realistic sculptures and portrait busts,
especially of women and children. Later he devoted himself to the creation of ‘the small fat men’, and with this
his art changed character in three ways: it becomes humorous and ironic. It becomes narrative – indeed Moseholm is
perhaps the most epic sculptor of the present time, since most of his sculptures depict situations that form part
of and presuppose a narrative sequence. Finally, his sculptures become portrayals of our lust for power,
our inflated self-images and our cruelty towards others.(...)
His sculptures often represent a fragile magic that is difficult to believe in,
yet nevertheless touches the viewer.”
From the book Literature and Intersubjectivity by Professor Jørgen Dines Johansen, University of Southern Denmark, 2009
CV
Keld Moseholm (1936–2023) was a Danish sculptor and draughtsman. His bronze sculptures stand in public spaces in many places in Denmark and abroad, and his works have been exhibited at art museums and art biennials in Denmark and internationally, most recently at Faaborg Museum in celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday and at the sculpture biennial “Sculpture by the Sea” in Sydney, where he had been a regular exhibitor since 1999. He studied at the Funen Art Academy from 1958–1962 and later at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1965–1970.