Mini-retrospective of Screenprints that celebrates the collaboration between the artist Peter Hedegaard (1929-2008) and his wife Isolde who together produced over 50 editions from 1965 to 1976.
Peter Hedegaard was born in Copenhagen but came to England with his parents in 1935. He was educated at Charterhouse and Hertford College, Oxford before studying Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture. After a short period of work as a designer Hedegaard turned to painting in the early 1960s, with a studio in Belsize Park, London. In 1965 he also began to make screenprints; his wife Isolde taught herself the process and together they collaborated on two or three screenprint editions each year.
Hedegaard had early solo exhibitions of his geometrical work in 1966 at the Musée Municipal St-Paul de Vence, France followed by an exhibition in London at the Architectural Association in 1967. In 1971 he had a solo show at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. By 1977 Hedegaard had stopped his art production.
In 2010 the Department of Prints & Drawings, British Museum, London acquired a group of screenprints & gouaches; and Hedegaard’s painting Green & yellow – with which he had been a prizewinner in the 1974 John Moores Liverpool Painting Exhibition – was included in This could happen to you at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
Rocket presented its first exhibition of Peter Hedegaard in 2010, and the major painting Green & yellow and a group of smaller works were acquired by the Mercedes Art Collection, Germany. In 2012 Southampton City Art Gallery and the V&A both acquired groups of screenprints. In 2018 RISD Museum, Rhode Island, USA acquired a gouache. In 2018 the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford acquired a group of screenprints.
In May 2019 Rocket presented a retrospective exhibition of Peter Hedegaard’s work which included some of the largest canvases he painted in the 1970s. The Rocket Press published the first monograph on the artist’s work with a biographical essay by Chantal Condron, then curator at the Government Art Collection, and a preface by Nigel Prince, then Executive Director of Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
In January 2024 the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, Stuttgart acquired a rare 1967 Hedegaard painting that had been exhibited in the Rocket group exhibition Childhood in 2022.
