Asger Jorn

Avant-garde artist Asger Jorn painted spontaneously and impulsively. With a refined power in his handling of color, he is the foremost Danish artist of his time. He made his debut in Silkeborg at the age of nineteen and continued his studies a few years later in Paris for Fernand Lèger.
Throughout the 1940s, Jorn moved beyond the Surrealist tradition, heavily influenced by Miró, in favour of spontaneous abstraction, in which the motifs and figurative elements of birds and masks played a crucial role. In 1948, Jorn made a breakthrough with his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Breteau, the same year he formed the CoBrA group, an association of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, together with the Belgian-Dutch artists Karel Appel, Corneille, Pierre Alechinsky and others. Its focus was on informal and expressionist art. The group looked to the immediate and imaginative forms found in folk art and children's drawings. The aim was to free art from the norms and styles of Western culture and to express the fantasies of the subconscious without the censoring influence of the intellect.
Jorn's work shows great contradictions ranging from soft and sensitive to extremely temperamental. He was a multi-tasker, expressing himself in many different techniques such as collage, sculpture and ceramics, as well as writing books in the fields of politics, culture, history and economics. Asger Jorn's palette often contained burning colors, influenced by Munch's undulating expressive brushwork with symbols and hidden messages. In his art one finds joy, but also the grotesque.

Arild Wahlström was a Norwegian industrialist and CEO, later chairman of Sande Tresliperi A/S and Sande Paper Mill A/S. Besides business and sports, Wahlström had a great interest in art and art collecting, which he shared with his wife Aasta. In their home in Holmenkollen, the couple built an extensive collection of major Norwegian and international works. Wahlström traveled extensively and often combined his travels with visits to galleries and artists. He developed close relationships with several artists and met Poliakoff, Henry Moore, Soulanges, Manessier, Singier, and many others. He was invited three times to visit Picasso in southern France with the gallery owner Kahnweiler, but each time, business got in the way, which was a great disappointment. Wahlström's great interest in Picasso's graphics was sparked after the war, during a business trip to Paris in 1946. In a small side street, the Wahlström couple discovered a picture of a woman's head in an art gallery. "It was so beautiful - we were both taken with it immediately. It was something extraordinary." The incident led to intensive collecting and resulted in one of the world's largest private collections of Picasso graphics, with over 1,000 graphic prints. In 1982, Arild Wahlström donated nearly 500 of these prints, including the entire Vollard suite, to the National Gallery in Oslo.