Asger Jorn, huge and fun at IVAM

The exposure Open creation and its enemies: Asger Jorn in situation displays a wide range of paintings, drawings, engravings, publications and documents from all phases of Asger Jornin order to claim their contribution, in addition to their outstanding participation in the group snake. Asger Jorn (Vejrum, Denmark, 1914-1973), known for being one of the most visible members of this group, knew how to transcend the informalist condition of post-war art and sought a place in the drift of gestural painting, outside of dark European expressionism.

Based on these considerations, this exhibition aims to put this artist's work into perspective in various directionsestablishing relationships with abstract expressionism, situationism and even pop art and certain social practices, although ultimately what stands out is the great depth and breadth of a pleasing painting.

Graduated in Paris at the Academy of Fernand Leger in the 1930s, Jorn soon delved into the chimeras of surrealism while approaching the latest kandinsky oh I lookwithout abandoning his attraction to expressionist James Enson. This formative period, in which Jorn lays the foundations of his work, is carefully represented with works that appear in the 40s as Finkidong Landscape (1945) or Tolitikuja (1945).

[Hogar workers enter the museum: the exhibition that pays homage to the collective]

In these works, as well as in the front and back paintings untitled (1946) and anime animals (1944-46), Jorn manifests himself with an irreverent color palette and playful with shapes; The fun painting deliberately done badly.

Thus, on a well-established construction base, the soft and organic forms come to life later. The biomorph is replicated with surrealist automatism and embraces primitivism as a free space where the mythical emerges with force into Konge King of the Underworld (1942) or later in wounded beast II (1953). And from here we can observe the agreements with a Jackson Pollock which will later reappear in the form of drops. It's from rock paintingluminous and nuanced works appear as djerba (1947), in which Miró flies over again.

Jorn deals with painting, reworking images of the world and making the viewer a participant in them.

This work, as in the linear drawings of this period, is marked by Jorn's trip to Tunis, where he captured his interest in decorativismdeveloping his theory on ornament and a particular way of composing according to a technical diagram.

It is not surprising that, based on this interest, Jorn approaches aspects of artistic creation in which blur the boundaries between art, crafts, design and architecture, as well as the hierarchies between the artist as creator and the operator. This is how he carried out several decoration orders working in ceramics and tapestry. An unknown facet of which the tapestry barely appears here The oiseau in the forest (1946-47).

From there, the exhibition about Jorn from the 50s opens, starting with his well-known participation in the group Cobra. Symbolic motifs and creatures of various species circulate freely on canvases, engravings and fire drawings. Deformity dresses up as grotesque through a raw and dynamic gesture. His convalescence from tuberculosis and his subsequent recovery lead him to represent both fear and joy.

fierce work like male resistance (1953), elskovskampen any Cherchez la femme (1954) use extreme expressive resources in an excellent painting. This is how Jorn deals with painting, reworking the images of the world and making the viewer a participant in them. “We are all involved,” he said. The spectator as such no longer exists and cannot exist at this moment.”

With this comes a conscious commitment which leads Jorn to participate in situationism and incorporate into his work a particular attention to the sources of image, popular art, the banal and children's imagination. An agitated animal installation then emerges to crudely represent human life in gross disfigurements in Warning, Danger (1957) and Ainsi on s'sensor (1962).

The pictorial actions of the Situationist disorder on found paintings or pre-existing pictorial materials are followed by newspaper clippings assembled in paint. In them shows the other side of European pop cultureas seen in Goinfre neckline à la neige (1968). With Franz Kafka in the background, Jorn celebrates kitsch and the forms of expression, both popular and intimate banalities, in which he gives a clear example, once again, of his interest in editorial experiments and illustration.

With all this, the last room houses a succession of stimulating pictorial echoes, over which you can jump and look slowly. A work that spreads the celebratory dimensions of painting the enormity of the world.

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