The avant-garde artist Asger Jorn painted spontaneously and impulsively. With a refined mastery of colour, he was the foremost of the Danish artists of his generation. He made his debut in Silkeborg at the age of nineteen and continued his studies a few years later in Paris under Fernand Lèger.

Throughout the 1940s, Jorn moved beyond the surrealist, strongly Miró-inspired tradition in favour of spontaneous abstraction, in which motifs of birds and masks, as well as figurative elements, played a decisive role. In 1948, Jorn made his major breakthrough with his first solo exhibition in Paris, at Galerie Breteau. That same year, together with, among others, the Belgian-Dutch artists Karel Appel, Corneille and Pierre Alechinsky, he founded the CoBrA group, an association of artists from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam. The group focused on informal and expressionist art. Its members sought out the immediate and evocative forms found in folk art and children’s drawings. Their aim was to liberate art from the norms and stylistic conventions of Western culture and to express the fantasies of the subconscious without the censoring influence of the intellect.

Jorn’s work reveals profound contrasts, ranging from the soft and sensitive to the intensely temperamental. He was a polymath who expressed himself through a wide range of techniques, including collage, sculpture and ceramics, and also wrote books on subjects such as politics, culture, history and economics. Asger Jorn’s palette most often comprised fiery colours, influenced by Munch’s undulating, expressive brushwork, with its symbols and hidden messages. His art conveys joy, but also the grotesque.