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Lot Essay
Writhing, riotous colour teems, drips and gushes from Asger Jorn’s Montagne des Survivants (Mountain of Survivors). The intimate panel is alive with smears of periwinkle; flurries of yellow, green and orange; and volatile spirals of black together conjuring a fantastical world of feverish energy. Painted in 1960, Montagne de Survivants dates, arguably, to some of the most significant years of Jorn’s practice during which he fully married his philosophical and artistic beliefs. Fuelled by a fascination with Pataphysics, a pseudoscience invested in imaginary phenomena, Jorn found a theoretical grounding to underpin his paintings. Pataphysics embraces riddles, chaos and indeterminate outcomes; no single interpretation is every privileged, an understanding reflected in Montagne de Survivants where seemingly familiar figures and topographies are deliberately ambiguous painterly spectres that refuse to be fixed in place.
In 1948, Jorn was a founding member of the hugely influence CoBrA movement, a group of experimental artists whose works celebrated spontaneous, automatic gestures using vivid, outlandish colours. Although CoBrA was short-lived – lasting only three years – Jorn’s output preserved vestiges of this rebellious aesthetic. Indeed, he retained an anarchic spirt, both in life and in his art, helping to establish, with Guy Debord, the Internationale Situationiste, which brought together activists, avant-garde artists and intellectuals to advance critiques of capitalist society. Jorn’s expressive, vivacious aesthetic continued in this period during which Montagne de Survivants was painted. Guided by a confidence in automatism central to Pataphysics, Jorn’s patterns and shapes were defined temporally, determined by what he had just painted, every mark an instinctive reaction to the organic whole. Rhythmically, the colours bloomed and obscured, clouded, exploded, doubled and collapsed, each application guiding the next, and in the painting we find evidence of its own creation—the birth of an image.
In 1948, Jorn was a founding member of the hugely influence CoBrA movement, a group of experimental artists whose works celebrated spontaneous, automatic gestures using vivid, outlandish colours. Although CoBrA was short-lived – lasting only three years – Jorn’s output preserved vestiges of this rebellious aesthetic. Indeed, he retained an anarchic spirt, both in life and in his art, helping to establish, with Guy Debord, the Internationale Situationiste, which brought together activists, avant-garde artists and intellectuals to advance critiques of capitalist society. Jorn’s expressive, vivacious aesthetic continued in this period during which Montagne de Survivants was painted. Guided by a confidence in automatism central to Pataphysics, Jorn’s patterns and shapes were defined temporally, determined by what he had just painted, every mark an instinctive reaction to the organic whole. Rhythmically, the colours bloomed and obscured, clouded, exploded, doubled and collapsed, each application guiding the next, and in the painting we find evidence of its own creation—the birth of an image.