Traces

100 Years Asger Jorn

The exhibition Traces – 100 Years Asger Jorn at the Cobra Museum for modern art in Amsterdam marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Asger Jorn (1914-1973), with works by Jorn and selected works by his contemporaries. Asger Jorn is known as the artist who invented in 1964 the three sided football match to explain his notion of triolectics, his refinement on the concept of dialectic, as well as to disrupt one’s everyday idea of football . The first world cup of three sided football took place May 2014 in Denmark.

Traces – 100 Years Asger Jorn includes two partial exhibitions: Asger Jorn – The Secret of Art, a unique gift from the Otto van de Loo family of some 150 works on paper, and A Way of Making, a new project by contemporary artists Frederique Bergholtz and Maria Pask.

Asger Jorn is known as one of the founders of Cobra (1948-1951), the International Situationists (1957-1972) and other groups, and worked in a wide variety of media.

Jorn successfully brought his diverse interests together in an organic way, in a comprehensive theory about art and life, based on a very explicit idea of the role of the artist in society. In short, Asger Jorn left a legacy of artworks, writings, a way of thinking and an attitude that continue to be an inspiration for today’s artists and thinkers.

The Secret of Art
Donation of 150 works by Asger Jorn
“The secret of art consists in the simple fact that it is more blessed to give than to take, but also that this blessedness is dependent upon voluntary giving, so that what is given is felt as a surplus, a wealth, not a duty.”. Asger Jorn, Value and Economy (1959)

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The Cobra Museum of Modern Art has recently received a beautiful and extensive donation from Otto van der Loo and family. It is now on view in its entirety for the first time. This generous gift includes, amongst others, a number of the first colour etchings that Jorn completed in 1958, as well as the complete Schweizer Suite series (1954) and several dynamic woodcuts, in which Jorn subtly and sometimes also humorously played with the grain of the wood, which ran in different directions.

About Das offene Versteck, from 1970, one of the works from the Van der Loo donation, Rudi Fuchs wrote, ‘The colourful thicket in the print by Jorn is as askew as the motion of his hand. Tomorrow it can be different. Art dazzlingly keeps beavering away.’