Asger Jorn
scultura figurata. paintings and sculptures.
02.05.02 - 29.06.02
"I'm content; I have arrived; I feel I have concluded what I had to conclude."
That's the way Jorn put it when he finished working on the large sculpture group in bronze and marble, which he - with an incredible burst of exertion - created in Italy in the course of 1972, immediately before his death in the spring of 1973. He felt he had completed his life's artistic work.
Galleri Faurschou is very pleased and very proud of being able to show a number of these sculptures together with the large painting entitled Scultura Figurata, a painting that is one of Jorn's most dynamic and potent works. Above and beyond this, it carries the special story that Jorn employed it as a point of origin for precisely these sculptures, which artistically delineate the last years of his life.
Scultura Figurata, finished in 1972, is Jorn's last large painting (250 x 200 cm). It was one of Jorn's "traveling works". He began working on the piece in 1969 and carried it with him in the ensuing years when he traveled from his home in Albisola, Italy, to Silkeborg, Denmark, and Paris, France.
In many ways, Scultura Figurata gathers together the efforts on which Jorn had concentrated in his paintings, throughout his whole life. In the center of the composition, there is a figure radiating warmth and light that can be seen in a flowing stream of intense colors, possessing a form that might call to mind a plant, a person or a cross. In this figure and in the smaller surrounding figures, we recognize Jorn's whole universe of fantastic beings: animals, birds and other physiognomies, which coalesce with the colors' many layers. From the impetuous brushwork we get a sense of Jorn's whole working method: the spontaneous capitulation to the stream of images that emerge freely and flow intuitively, when all control is thrown aside.
Throughout his life Jorn had been working and experimenting with transferring these organic forms and hybrid beings into a three-dimensional form. In the easily moldable clay, he could work very spontaneously with the figures and improvise, in much the manner of his technique with painting. But it was not until 1972 that he felt sufficiently confident in transferring his improvisational method to the three-dimensional, that he feels ready to try working with the harder materials of classical sculpture: bronze and marble.
What is so impressive about these sculptures is how elegantly and lavishly he succeeded in preserving the powerful expressionism and spontaneity so typical of his work. The sculptures' complexity, in terms of both content and form, is amplified by the possibility of moving around them, a process of transformation he did not have the opportunity to express in the same way in his paintings. Per Kirkeby writes in his essay for the exhibition catalogue: "Jorn's sculptures are a reification of brushstrokes. He removes the brushstrokes from their painterly space and imparts to them a self-contained plasticity in the 'real' world".
In Galleri Faurschou, you now have the opportunity of viewing this significant development in Jorn's artistic praxis. For the present exhibition, Scultura Figurata and a selection of the appurtenant bronze and marble sculptures have been brought together again. This provides a unique chance to get close and to see how his paintings' many creatures live on as concrete and physical presences.
The exhibition period is from May 2. - June 29. 2002. An illustrated catalogue is being published.