15 November 2013 - 23 February 2014http://www.louisiana.dk/
The exhibition Asger Jorn & Jackson Pollock. Revolutionary Roads focuses on two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and on what was happening in expressionist painting in the years 1943-1963 – the period between the war years and the emergence of Pop Art. This is the first time one can experience a comparison of the two artists’ works.
These two prominent artists, the American Jackson Pollock and the Dane Asger Jorn, never met. They were of the same generation, one born in Cody, Wyoming, USA in 1912 and the other in Vejrum, in Jutland, in 1914. Both were influenced by the same currents – the local tradition and the influence of the great European avant-gardists, especially Picasso. Both were fascinated by Surrealism’s liberation of the unconscious material in the human psyche, and both worked with automatic drawing, drip techniques, canvases on the floor and an experimental application of the paint. Both artists were intensely interested in myths: in Jorn’s case figures of Norse legend and imaginary beings formed the basis for the idea of a kind of fundamental images, of freer, more direct communication between art and the viewer. Pollock was preoccupied with the sand-paintings of the Native Americans and other folk art, and linked this ornamental tradition with the dynamics of ‘drip’ or ‘action’ painting. Each in his own way, the two artists revolutionized painting in the post-war years. Pollock represents the climax of modernism, while Jorn with his formal idiom also seeks both to subvert and liberate painting as communication.