Danish sculptor, painter, designer and printmaker.
He studied painting at the Konelige Danske Kunstakademi, Copenhagen, under Aksel Jørgensen and Ejnar Nielsen, and he briefly studied sculpture until informed he lacked talent. From 1942 he exhibited at the Cornerudstilling and Høstudstilling, and from 1949 he was a member of the group Decembristerne (the Decembrists). He had close connections with the avant-garde periodicals Linien, Helhesten and Cobra, and he participated in the great international Cobra exhibitions. Heerup’s work, however, was always individual. His popular pieces have timeless and universal subjects depicted in bright colours and a narrative, naively simplified, formal language. He often used the Trinity of the family: man, woman and child and such symbols as the wheel of life, the heart, the cross and the bell, and he often incorporated a portrait of himself, with a bicycle and a goblin’s cap. Over the years he became something of a myth, as the happy ‘foreman of the Goblins’ Union’, as he styled himself. He also tackled darker subject-matter such as death, pain and separation, however.