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拍品專文
‘I paint. Suddenly, I discover a colour that excites me. I begin to get interested in this and forget my idea. In the end, the picture is different from what I imagined [….]. I have to put it in its place. A perpetual battle.’ ASGER JORN
Walking a tightrope between figuration and abstraction, Asger Jorn’s Untitled is a blast of colour, semi-discernible forms and expressive brushwork. Painting in thick, gestural swoops of primary colours, a large foregrounded face becomes overloaded with a saturation of paint. These bravura swirls also characterise the dense background, where a number of other, semi-distinguishable humanoid forms gyrate and gesticulate. Recalling primitive masks or children’s drawings, this colourful eruption of figuration seems hallucinatory in its partially abstract description. Commenting on this dizzying dichotomy between the two paradoxical modes of painting, Erik Steffensen, a fellow Scandinavian artist, declared ‘he was a painter in earnest, giving way to the hard gestural aspects of painting and allowing narrative elements to slip into the background: modern art with substance, created by an eye that has seen [the] best products of painterly culture’ (E. Steffensen, Asger Jorn, Hellerup, 1995, p. 11).
This heady hybridity of figurative abstraction was championed by CoBrA, one of the most vital avant-garde groups in post-war Europe, formed by Asger Jorn and Karel Appel in 1948 to unify like-minded artists in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Whilst divorcing from existing art movements, the group favoured spontaneity and freedom of expression over purely figurative art, which they thought to be crude, or pure abstraction, which to them seemed sterile and inhuman. Regardless of their non-conformist attitude, the movement shared similar intentions with the Abstract Expressionists in America. Notably, parallels can be drawn between the figuration-abstraction tension in Jorn’s Untitled and the women depicted by Willem de Kooning or earlier works by Jackson Pollock, who favoured a similar approach to semi-abstract forms and colourisation. Chromatic schema, as demonstrated excellently by the present work, was a vital imperative of painting for Jorn. The electrifying brightness of his palette is perhaps best explained by his continental relocation in 1953, swapping the dark wintery chill of Denmark for the sunny brightness of Albissola, an Italian seaside town. The CoBrA movement had recently disbanded; each artist had decided to work independently. Untitled is emblematic of Jorn’s continuing progress and stylistic evolution, greatly superseding the group’s initial styles and concepts. The bright hues, roughly articulated forms and highly expressive momentum fuse the concerns typical of modernist abstraction with the ameliorating impact that Jorn’s relocation had on his dynamic approach to composition and colour.
Walking a tightrope between figuration and abstraction, Asger Jorn’s Untitled is a blast of colour, semi-discernible forms and expressive brushwork. Painting in thick, gestural swoops of primary colours, a large foregrounded face becomes overloaded with a saturation of paint. These bravura swirls also characterise the dense background, where a number of other, semi-distinguishable humanoid forms gyrate and gesticulate. Recalling primitive masks or children’s drawings, this colourful eruption of figuration seems hallucinatory in its partially abstract description. Commenting on this dizzying dichotomy between the two paradoxical modes of painting, Erik Steffensen, a fellow Scandinavian artist, declared ‘he was a painter in earnest, giving way to the hard gestural aspects of painting and allowing narrative elements to slip into the background: modern art with substance, created by an eye that has seen [the] best products of painterly culture’ (E. Steffensen, Asger Jorn, Hellerup, 1995, p. 11).
This heady hybridity of figurative abstraction was championed by CoBrA, one of the most vital avant-garde groups in post-war Europe, formed by Asger Jorn and Karel Appel in 1948 to unify like-minded artists in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. Whilst divorcing from existing art movements, the group favoured spontaneity and freedom of expression over purely figurative art, which they thought to be crude, or pure abstraction, which to them seemed sterile and inhuman. Regardless of their non-conformist attitude, the movement shared similar intentions with the Abstract Expressionists in America. Notably, parallels can be drawn between the figuration-abstraction tension in Jorn’s Untitled and the women depicted by Willem de Kooning or earlier works by Jackson Pollock, who favoured a similar approach to semi-abstract forms and colourisation. Chromatic schema, as demonstrated excellently by the present work, was a vital imperative of painting for Jorn. The electrifying brightness of his palette is perhaps best explained by his continental relocation in 1953, swapping the dark wintery chill of Denmark for the sunny brightness of Albissola, an Italian seaside town. The CoBrA movement had recently disbanded; each artist had decided to work independently. Untitled is emblematic of Jorn’s continuing progress and stylistic evolution, greatly superseding the group’s initial styles and concepts. The bright hues, roughly articulated forms and highly expressive momentum fuse the concerns typical of modernist abstraction with the ameliorating impact that Jorn’s relocation had on his dynamic approach to composition and colour.