Zattere, Burano, San Michele

Richard Mortensen’s works from the late 1970s can be seen as confirmation of his Concrete painting from the 1950s, only with gentler geometry and a sparkling colour scheme.

Large-scale works In 1973 Mortensen builds a large studio by his house in Ejby near Roskilde, thus obtaining the physical settings necessary for executing very large-scale works. Mortensen goes from working with series of individual pictures to joining up several canvases to form a larger picture plane. Zattere, Burano, S. Michele consists of six square canvases put together to form a whole.

An architectural impule prompting the picture Mortensen describes how the Venetian passages that pass right through a house p...