Asger Jorn citater

Asger Jorn is one of the voices that reminds us that art can be both play and thought. He wrote and created with energy, humor, and deep creativity, making his words and ideas vivid and relevant. When we share his quotes, we share not only artistic visions but a life energy that inspires new ways of seeing the world.

If you don’t go to extremes, don’t bother to go.

Creating new knowledge involves quashing or breaking up old knowledge so as to make room for the new.

Through play, one will always, sooner or later, find the right thing, something that can be worked up.

Wrecking cannot be avoided, but people are free to choose what to wreck and what not to wreck.

A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible.

Beautiful, ugly, impressive, disgusting, meaningless, grim, contradictory etc … It makes no difference, as long as it is life, vigorously pouring forth.

To break and be able to grow together again in a better way: that is the difficult art.

Everything is in constant flux, from state to state, from good to bad and back again…, only in transmutation, perpetual motion, lies truth.

The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough.

We are sparks that must glow as brightly as possible.

To make the material speak to man in the name of man, this is the aim and reality of art.

Anything really new is repulsive, because it is abnormal and unreasonable.

True realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.

We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art.

We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.

Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.

I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection.

The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought.

You can often give a better description of the fight between people, the essentials of it, by means of fantastic animals, the simple, primitive, naked instincts, than by depicting a specific situation. It is not the human animal we should describe, b

The significance of something lies in its presence here and now. I don't care what it has been or what it will become. It is the experience of things that matters, the confrontation with things.

To get anywhere, one must choose one's mistakes. I chose experimental acts.

We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition...

To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today.

We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation.

The reverse process is extremely important to me - that artistic images can inspire to words and different myths, and that in certain cultures this process has been the normal relation between images and words.

During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength.

This is what aesthetics, development and progress depend upon: that we go out on thin ice.

Being an artist is being an isolated individual.

In the beginning was the image.

If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression.

If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces... It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.

We like to learn all we need from earlier generations, but we have to find out for ourselves what we need; nobody else can do that for us.

The artist's interest cannot be restricted to a single field; he must seek the highest perception of everything, of the whole and its details.

The goal changes from the general to the individual from need to wish, from ethics to aesthetics.

Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.