15/06/2026
Over the summer, SPECTA presents a series of works by Poul Pedersen.
The painter Poul Pedersen painted letters. Poul Pedersen originally worked as a house and sign painter, but in the 1960s he became part of a group of avant-garde artists in Aarhus and began working as an artist. One of Poul Pedersen's absolute masterpieces is The Stolen Alphabet. Over a number of years, Poul Pedersen sought out famous paintings to – at times with great public attention – copy letters onto a canvas. An A from a painting by Picasso, an H from Robert Rauschenberg, a P from Mondrian, a Q from Asger Jorn, etc. 24 years after starting this theft, Poul Pedersen completed the series, 25 letters, and he then donated the entire The Stolen Alphabet to the State Library in Aarhus, DK. As Poul Pedersen said, the painters had stolen the letters from the writers, and now he had stolen them from the painters and sent them back to live among the books.
In his work Fowal (2013), Poul Pedersen has quoted from the Danish poet Johannes V. Jensen’s poem from 1906 with the same title. Each letter is painted on its own canvas - a total of 36 canvases - and the typography is from his own The Stolen Alphabet.
Poul Pedersen was born in Denmark, but lived and worked in Paris since the 1970s. He was a member of the Danish artists association Den Frie.
From 1996, Poul Pedersen received the Danish Arts Foundation's Honorary Grant, and in 2007 he was awarded the Eckersberg Medal and in 2020 the Thorvaldsen Medal, both awarded by the Academy Council.
Poul Pedersen was represented by SPECTA for more thsn 30 years.
Poul Pedersen passed away at the end of February 2026, at the age of 92.
