20th-century Danish painters

Svend Wiig Hansen (20 December 1922 – 15 March 1997) was a Danish sculptor and painter.

K.R.H. Sonderborg (1923–2008) was a German painter, graphic artist, university professor, and from 1980 prorector of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart for several years.
He was born in Sønderborg/Als, Denmark. Starting in 1953, he became a member of the group Zen 49, and studied at the Atelier 17 in St. W. Hayter in Paris. In the years 1953-1965, he spent time working in London, New York City, Tokyo, Chicago, Osaka, Cornwall, Ascona, Rome and Paris.
In 1951, the artist Kurt Rudolf Hoffmann called himself K.R.H. Sonderborg, after the town he was born in. Sonderborg went to school in Hamburg and completed a merchant's apprenticeship in 1939. He became a private student of the painter Ewald Becker-Carus in Hamburg in 1946. From 1947 to 1949 he studied painting, graphic art, and textile design at the State Art School in Hamburg under Willem Grimm and Maria May. In 1953 he joined the artists group Zen 49. He went to Paris the same year where he received training in engraving from Stanley William Hayter in the Atelier 17. Paris is also the place where he first encountered Tachism. In the following years, the artist went on longer journeys and worked for some time in London, Cornwall, New York, Ascona, Rome, and Paris again. In New York K.R.H. Sonderborg came into contact with Action Painting.
His own style became abstract, painting in swift broad strokes, that reveal the painting process, with spontaneous color application. Black and white contrasts are an important feature, later he added colors such as cadmium red. K.R.H. Sonderborg took part in the 1958 Biennale in Venice. He was awarded the Prize for Graphic Art at the Biennale in Tokyo in 1960 and the Great International Prize for Drawing at the 1963 Biennale in São Paulo. The artist showed works at the Documenta in Kassel in both 1959 and 1964. From 1965 to 1990 he held a post as Professor for Painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. In 1969/70 he was a guest lecturer at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. Along with artists such as Karl Otto Götz, and Bernhard Schulze, K.R.H. Sonderborg is one of the most important and most impressive representatives of German Informal Art.
K.R.H. Sonderborg died in Hamburg on 18 February 2008, aged 84.

Torben Niels Ebbesen (born 10 July 1945) is a Danish sculptor and painter. His installations in contrasting materials and other abstract works can be seen in locations in Denmark, Germany and Sweden as well as in several Danish museums.

Franciska Clausen (7 January 1899 – 5 March 1986) was a Danish painter who was involved in the abstract art movement of the early twentieth century.
Clausen studied at the Die Grossherzogliche sächsische Hochschule für bildende Kunst in Weimar, Germany (1916–17), at the Women's Academy in Munich (1918–19), at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, in Copenhagen, Denmark (1920–21), and under Hans Hofmann at the Hofmann Schule Fur Moderne Kunst in Munich (1921–22). She subsequently sought out private lessons from László Moholy-Nagy, Berlin (Sept. – Dec. 1922), from Alexander Archipenko in Berlin in 1923, and under Fernand Léger in Paris (1924–25). She was inspired by László Moholy-Nagy's Constructionist collages. From 1924 to 1928 in Paris, a cubist style can be seen in her paintings with a base in Léger's 'machine style art'. Between 1924 and 1928, Clausen worked in Paris. In the paintings from this period such as Konstruktiv modellstudie (1925), Contre-Composition (1928), and Komposition (1927), the influence of Léger's machine style is clearly visible. In 1933, she taught at the Tegne- og Kunstindustriskolen for Kvinder (Drawing and applied arts school for women) in Copenhagen. Throughout her career, Clausen passed through most of the stages in the development of modern art, and her paintings show elements of Neue Sachlichkeit, Constructivism, Cubism, Neo-plasticism, Surrealism and Purism, though her greatest influence was Léger.

Jens Jørgen Thorsen (2 February 1932 Holstebro – 15 November 2000) was a Danish artist, director, and jazz musician whose works sometimes created controversy.
Thorsen began his artistic career attending periodically the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Jens Jørgen Thorsen was part of the Situationist International Movement, in particular his happenings and collaboration with Jørgen Nash are well documented.
Thorsen also wrote, directed, and starred in a number of films, the most notable of them being Quiet Days in Clichy (Stille dage i Clichy,1970), based on the Henry Miller novel.
In painting, Thorsen painted a number of abstract works, which have become increasingly collectible. He also stirred up controversy with a work depicting Jesus in a manner some considered pornographic. Thorsen planned a film called The Many Faces of Jesus, later The Sex Life of Jesus, and was to have involved both heterosexual and homosexual acts. The film plans met with strong national and international protests and accusations of blasphemy resulting in the Danish Film Academy withdrawing its financial support. The film was to have been made in Britain, but it faced intense opposition from Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, pressure groups, as well as from the Queen, then Prime Minister James Callaghan, the Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, and Pope Paul VI, who called the film "an insult ... which transforms Christ into sacrilegious bait for filthy falseness". The Return of Jesus (1992) (a completely different project) was made after the ban on the original project was rescinded in 1990. The controversy, and particularly Thorsen's reported interest in producing the film in the United States, led to a decades-long hoax that the release of such a film was imminent.Thorsen was also a jazz musician and co-founder of the group Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband.