Asger Jorn is born in Vejrum (Mid-Jutland) in 1914, as Asger Oluf Jørgensen. He starts his career as a portrait and landscape painter, but around 1934, he falls under the spell of cubism and abstract painting. One year later, he joins ‘Linien’, a group of surrealist oriented Danish artists. He settles in Paris, takes lessons from Fernand Léger, and works during a short period with Le Corbusier. The confrontation with the spontaneous work of his fellow-countryman Egill Jacobsen in 1937, prompts him to follow his own, free expression. He founds ‘Helhesten’ magazine, in which he advocates a free, expressive painting style.
After the war, Jorn seeks connection with Belgian and French surrealists. In 1946, he meets Constant and Atlan in Paris. Two years later he is co-founder of the Cobra group. In this period he uses a fierce, dramatic style of painting with heavy shapes and dark colours. Only in the mid fifties, he finds the style with which he will gain international fame. The fierce movement of the line in his earlier work turns into a dramatically moved mass of paint, in which shadowy creatures and hazy visions loom.
Like Constant, Jorn develops revolutionary ideas about the role of the artist in Western society. In 1956, he founds the ‘Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste’, together with Enrico Baj, and in 1957 he co-founds the ‘Situationist International’.
Jorn has had one-man exhibitions in, amongst others, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the New York Guggenheim Museum. In 2014, the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen organised a large Asger Jorn retrospective.
