Gunner la Cour decided early that he wanted to be an artist. At the age of 14 received private lessons from Flemming Bergsøe, and later Erik Clemmensen and Erling Frederiksen. He got the opportunity to attend technical school which was the closest school education for artistic trades. However, traditional education was still not quite the dream and he took a job as a sailor and travelled for a few years between South America and Japan. The experiences he had there and the things he saw became great inspiration for his future works.
At the age of 20, Gunner moved to Copenhagen and participated in the city’s artist milieu. He made his debut at the ‘artist’s autumn exhibition’ and ‘POEX’ at Den Fri in the 70s.
In 1971 he travelled to Paris to see the Max Ernst retrospective at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Surrealism and especially Ernst’s pictures remained a huge inspiration for Gunner’s artistic expression.
Soon after, he decided to move to Lolland to have more space and freedom. Here he dreamed of having a housing association and his own gallery. Gunner experimented with different forms of oil painting in a water bath. However, after years with a number of exhibitions in the local area, and less and less contact with the artist community in Copenhagen, there was disappointment in the limitations of the set-up. Gunner withdrew and worked in partial isolation over the next several years, until illness and divorce brought Gunner back to Copenhagen.
After that, his art style changed significantly, he started painting with acrylics. He worked productively in the last 30 years, creating a unique new style of fixed pictorial expression, focusing on nature and landscape. The style is unique in the way it does not reduce to a predictive figurative language while still capturing and creating a strong sentiment of nature and sensation of being in the landscape.
Gunner died in October 2021.
Selected Exhibitions:
1969 Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling ““Den Frie – Centre of Contemporary Art Copenhagen” Copenhagen, DK (group exhibition)
1970 Poex “Den Frie – Centre of Contemporary Art Copenhagen”, DK (group exhibition)
1971 Gunner la Cour “Bangs Galleri” Copenhagen, DK (solo exhibition)
1972 Gunner la Cour “Maribo Library” Maribo, DK (solo exhibition)
1973 Danish Russian Exchange, “Travelling exhibition” Leningrad and Moscow, Russia
(group exhibition)
1979 Gunner la Cour, “Aasmarkgade Galleri” Bandholm, DK (solo exhibition)
1984 Gunner la Cour “Miniature” Copenhagen, DK (solo exhibition)
1988 Interferans “Mitzi Galleri” Copenhagen, DK (solo exhibition)
2018 Når urskoven er fældet er det for altid “Oticon” Smørum, Denmark (solo exhibition)