Knud Nellemose

Knud Nellemose received two Honorable Mentions for his works Young Man with Discus (Bronze) and Head of a Boxer (Granite) at the 1948 London Olympics within the Art Competitions in the category Sculpturing, Statues. He was a prolific Danish sculptor who is remembered for his figures of sportsmen and his statues of famous Danes. Nellemose attended a drawing school and the art academy from 1927-33. He began his career as a cartoonist and sports journalist. A scholarship enabled him to travel to Italy, Greece, Turkey, France and the UK in the late 1940s. As a sculptor, he was known for his naturalistic human figures and portrait busts, often in motion, and sculpted numerous athletes, often with strong emotion, both in small and large formats, mostly in stone and bronze.

During World War II, Nellemose was a member of the Danish resistance group. Therefore, he later received many commissions for war memorials. He also used photographs as templates to represent prisoners from concentration camps in his sculptures. In 1965, he became a teacher at the Art Academy in Århus. The Thorvaldsen Medal, awarded in 1968, was one of his numerous honors. His sister, Karin (1905–93) was a well-known actress, figuring in many stage productions and films. In the 1930s he was married to painter Rita Elena Goltermann Hansen (married Nellemose and Baunsgaard, 1910-1985) from Argentina.

The bronze Ung mand med diskos (Young Man with Discus) from 1942 is 280 cm high together with its granite base. Nellemose received the Eckersberg Medal for this work in 1944. It was erected in 1949 at the Vejle Stadium in Copenhagen. The first version of the Bokserhovede (Head of a Boxer) was created in 1934 and was presented in 1948 in the granite version (1947). The height of this sculpture, which is located in the Stockholm National Museum, is 42 cm. It is remarkable that he received the Honorable Mention for both, Young Man with Discus and Head of a Boxer.

The bronze To Brydere or Brydere i kamp (in the art catalog as Group of Wrestlers) is 76 cm high and dates from 1938. It was a preparatory work for a larger-than-life group that Nellemose exhibited, but destroyed shortly afterwards. The original of the life-size bronze Fodboldspillere (Football Players, also called Tacklingen) from 1941 is displayed in the Trapholt Museum in Kolding. Until the 1980s, only slightly revised versions of this work were set up at different locations in Denmark. Denmark’s “Football Player of the Year” also receives a copy of the sculpture.