Asger jorn biography of alberta

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The 1949 COBRA exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam introduced his radical aesthetic to a broad European audience. It is the basis on which classical art is built. Like Tachisme, the COBRA group was closely related to the gesturalism wing of the broader European postwar expressionist movement known as Art Informel.

Somewhat like the Art Informel artists in France and the Abstract Expressionists in North America, Jorn placed enormous value on spontaneity, instinctive creation, and a kind of pantheistic attachment to a wider-than-human life-force. If one of these poles is removed, only boredom is left." It is perhaps primarily a mixture of the comic and the powerful - the gawky and imposing, friendly and fearsome - that is crystallized in image of the looming central bust.

As the Tate Gallery notes, "[t]he layered composition includes at least a dozen frenetic figures (rendered in various sizes and positions), loosely delineated with great energy." Or, as the writer Guy Atkins puts it, the work "[contains] a whole corps de ballet of floating, zooming, slanting or pirouetting figures." These figures are organized along a diagonal axis, with a central focal point around which they are oriented with "a fine balance of stresses".

Beyond direct affiliations, his interdisciplinary model—merging painting, writing, and activism—has informed contemporary practices invested in art’s social agency. In the last decade of his life, he focused primarily on sculpture. He is buried in the cemetery at Grötlingbo Church, on the island of Gotland in Sweden.

Although this painting was created some years after the CoBrA group disbanded, it exemplifies the child-like style that Jorn and other CoBrA artists embraced as a way of liberating their art from "repressive bourgeois conventions".

"Tension in a work of art is negative-positive: repulsive-attractive, ugly-beautiful. a gesture of childishness, defiance, as well as disgust ... As such, although he has perhaps not earned the fame of other artists of his generation, he helped to define what that generation stood for in the most fundamental, creative and conceptual sense.

Jorn later wrote that Christensen was like a second father to him.

The work and title allude to Hans Christian Andersen's well-known fairytale "The Ugly Duckling", in which a swan is raised by a family of ducks, spending its youth feeling alienated because of its obvious physical difference from the rest of its adopted family. At the same time, as in his studies of laughter and childish perception, Jorn's rawness of expression belies the complexity of the emotional and social states conveyed.

Equally important in this work is the presence of animals: as a radical materialist, Jorn did not draw a distinction between human and animal sentence; again, their presence here therefore seems to allude to the subversive potential of unsocialized states of consciousness. Shortly after marrying, they moved to Vanløse, a western district of Copenhagen.

Around this time, Jorn developed a friendship with the Danish art dealer Børge Birch, owner of the Galerie Birch.

The bottom quarter of the image is composed of green, brown, and red earth tones, with blue, skeletal-looking human forms buried within the bedrock. In 1957-61 he participated in the International Situationist movement. Underlying his writings was a struggle to balance his belief in Communism with his belief in the artistic elite. His co-founding of COBRA in 1948 signaled a break from traditional aesthetics, advocating for raw, spontaneous expression.

If one of these poles is removed, only boredom is left", Jorn said.

Jorn constantly stressed the importance for any artist of the study of culture and aesthetics, and as a result is remembered as one of the most committed abstract painters of the postwar period, and a thoughtful artist who wanted to reshape society. As a thinker and maker who refused compromise, Jorn remains a vital force in the ongoing reimagining of art’s role in society.