Biography

He began painting at the age of around 15 and exhibited his pictures for the first time in Silkeborg in 1933. In 1936 he moved to Paris, where Asger Oluf Jorn studied with Fernand Léger and worked for Le Corbusier. During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, Jorn returned to Denmark as an active communist and resistance fighter. He became a member of the artist group Høst. In 1948 he became a founding member of the group "CoBrA", which merged from the groups Høst, the Belgian Revolutionary Surrealist Group and Reflex. In the mid-1950s he continued to pursue the goals of Cobra under the programmatic name "Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste" (International Movement for an Artistic Bauhaus; Bauhaus) in opposition to Max Bill.

With Guy Debord he founded the Situationist International in 1957. He was also the founder of the movement for an artistic Bauhaus. Meanwhile, he became the leading figure in the later merger of both organizations with the Lettrist International and the London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International (SI). Here he used his scientific and mathematical knowledge, which he obtained from Henri Poincaré and Niels Bohr, to develop his situological technique. After spending almost a year and a half in a sanatorium, Asger Jorn moved to Switzerland in 1952. From 1955 his place of residence alternated between Paris and Albisola Marina near Genoa.

In 1959 and 1964 he took part in documenta II and documenta III in Kassel. In 1961 he left the SI to found the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism. However, he continued to finance the group's activities. In addition, Asger Oluf Jorn developed comprehensive theories of art and design, in which he also translated economic and political topics. In bright, impasto applied colors, his paintings often show spooky creatures that stand between animals and humans. Jorn often painted with a spontaneous automatism influenced by surrealism, which wanted to receive his impulses from deeper layers of the psyche and also give space to chance.

Asger Jorn died on May 1, 1973 in Aarhus.
- IMDb mini biography by: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth

Artist who founded the so-called "CoBrA" group in 1948 with Karel Appel, and Corneille, the name taken from the first letter of each artist's home town (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). Among its members were Hugo Claus.