About the Work
A few black brushstrokes delineate a profile. The overly long nose threatens to burst the format. Spontaneously, almost by chance, Asger Jorn peels the figure out of the colourful mixture of thickly applied paint. The Danish artist received his training in Classic Modernism. However, he criticises its dualist contrast between abstraction and figuration, image and object, reality and fiction. What interests him is the field of tension field in between. Jorn combines abstraction and figurative painting. Instead of, for example, giving up panel painting, as Minimal artists did, he subverts the painting from the inside, making it both informal and expressive, abstract and representational at the same time. Jorn's wide range of connections included membership of the CoBrA Group and the Situationist International, and he also regarded himself as a scientist, artist, philosopher and author.
