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 the current work, the color explosion 'Myg' from 1946, the depicted mosquitoes appear in a variety of colors and shapes.
Two years later, 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.