Klaus Jorn
Alexander Wood Gallery
New York
Curator: Stalke Galleri
Klaus Jorn’s exhibition at Alexander Wood Gallery in New York in 1988 received extensive press coverage in both Danish and international media. In Berlingske Tidende and Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, the exhibition was described as a surprise to many, as Jorn emerged with an independent artistic voice that both engaged with and distanced itself from Asger Jorn’s pictorial legacy. Writers such as Jeanette Andersen emphasized the tension in the works between an apparently childlike expression and a deeper existential gravity, highlighting their focus on relationships, memory, and identity.
In Kunstavisen, the exhibition was presented as a personal and courageous statement, where the immediacy and vulnerability of drawing lent the works a particular intensity. Internationally, the exhibition was followed by coverage in Flash Art, where Gabriele Peretta situated Klaus Jorn’s work
within a broader contemporary art context, emphasizing his ability to transform biographical material into an autonomous visual language.
Following the exhibition, a catalogue was published in collaboration with North Magazine, featuring a text by Gabrielle Peretta, further underscoring the significance of the exhibition and marking Klaus Jorn’s entry onto the international art scene.
Entrance to Alexander Wood Gallery on Spring Street, New York, showing the exhibition poster for Klaus Jorn’s solo show “Letters to My Father” (1988).
Full-page advertisement in Flash Art Europe announcing Klaus Jorn’s exhibition “Letters to My Father” at Alexander Wood Gallery, New York. The ad highlights the international presentation of Jorn’s early works.
Klaus Jorn
The Other Side of Hyperbole
Being an artist is not easy, and it has never been. There are both advantages and disadvantages. But the foundation of everything is common sense, which teaches one how to see and how to understand what one sees. "An artist would be wise to change careers." We’ve heard this many times, but there are also cases where it is the father who consciously initiates his son, from early childhood, into the memory of preserving the creative artistic craft.
When this "illness"—as in Klaus Jorn's case—is first transmitted and develops away from the father (even though the father remains ever-present), it does not lead to a resolution, but rather to an existential choice, a continuous process that encompasses the positive influence and the immortality hidden in the transmission, as well as a favorable opportunity offered by human nature itself. Various exceptions have clearly shown us that in the conscious act, one must address the audience directly, as the work moves in an opposite direction and seeks its own continuity, which immediately makes it clear to us that Asger Jorn's son should not necessarily be considered a copy of his father, even though they share the same surname.
Klaus Jorn painted alongside his father as a child, traveled with him, and frequented the Parisian artistic milieu of the late 1950s. He also worked in his father's studio, helping, among other things, to stretch canvases. He learned how to construct a painting but left home during his teenage years. After a deep internal crisis that led him into isolation and self-destruction, he has now completely freed himself from the historical baggage that weighed him down and strives, as he puts it, to "find balance in the world through visual art."
It would be meaningless to delve into every detail that connects his life to that of his father. One could fill entire books with stories rooted in cohesion and love, passion and rebellion, but it is worth noting that the "result" is Klaus Jorn's own maturity, and what matters is his body of work.
Klaus Jorn finds great support in music for his artistic endeavors. He never pressures himself to draw more than one picture a day, and while working, he often listens to music. Ever since childhood, he has loved clarinets. He owns five, one of which he built himself from a piece of wood. He is fond of Plato, Kierkegaard, and Freud. He criticizes H.C. Andersen and speaks of Freud as if he were a fellow writer who failed at writing a novel when addressing sexuality but was spot-on in discussing the ego, the id, and the superego.
The daily practice of drawing and painting on paper holds great significance for Klaus Jorn. He often visits churches in Copenhagen, and before starting to paint, he performs rituals that he describes in a way that sends chills down your spine. He stopped playing jazz several years ago, preferring traditional genres that he used to perform in jazz clubs in the past. The mention of jazz brings to mind musician Joe Jackson's words, which seem to describe Klaus Jorn's art: "Art is timeless; it paints an inner time." His art reaches toward infinity. He himself says that it depicts a limitless journey. He adds that the beauty and intensity of a painting are like an "egg," with the yolk representing the essential and the journey toward the center.
Notre Dame in Paris is one of the churches he cherishes most. Its two towers symbolize a balance between two forces, and this balance is precisely what he strives for in his art: the love and friendship between two beings, always represented in his works by two symbols of closure and openness, respectively.
The attentive observer can and should note the many influences that have shaped Jorn. These date back to Plato's "Apology" and the dialogue "Gorgias," where we encounter the charismatic Socrates. This is evident, for instance, in the emphasis Jorn places on the quality of life over its duration, his discourse on the absence of time, and the myth of the "naked" human being and the use of the body as a metaphor in argumentation, as he recounts his search for the mother. Klaus Jorn says that his artistic journey began the day he learned to draw a triangle. The triangle is the opposite of a woman's curves, and since then, starting with this triangle, he has consistently aimed to create a unique, unified work.
The attentive observer will also notice how, as happened with certain artists in the 19th century and some in the first half of the 20th century, since the 1960s, there has been a return to a philological-classical visual world. This has produced some of the most radical and groundbreaking speculative positions in painting. In speaking of Plato, Socrates, Kierkegaard, and Freud, the artist sets boundaries and rejects any possibility of renewal; instead, he stands firm on the significance of antiquity and the unchangeable nature of Truth and the Word. This ancient, anti-historical, and non-contemporary viewpoint contrasts with the historicism that seems to creep into the geo-art and neo-conceptual movements of our time.
"At a certain point, humans reach a cognitive stance and create their knowledge," says Carlo Michelstaedter (Gorizia 1887–Gorizia 1910). "The work confirms its entire personality, provided the method and the right to creation remain intact. And this is the decisive point: reason, the absolute: the divine." (C. Michelstaedter). This attitude toward knowledge characterizes the few who critique modern science. To criticize modern science is to reject the false "certainty" that science and the "scientific" society promise their followers by integrating them into a machinery of convenience and consumption, thereby depriving them of their individual responsibility. Instead of the overconfident, we encounter here the armored man. He represents the other side of hyperbole. (See C. Michelstaedter: "La persuasione e la rettorica," ed. Sergio Campailla, Adelphi, 2nd ed., Milan, 1986).
Gabriele Perretta
(Thanks are extended to Tine Koefoed for collaborating on and editing the interview that formed the basis of this text)
This catalogue essay by Italian critic Gabriele Perretta — later recognised as one of Italy’s central theorists of post-media and visual communication — was written for Klaus Jorn’s exhibition at Stalke/Jedig in the late 1980s.
Perretta was among the first international critics to write about the Stalke circle, helping to connect Stalke’s early Danish experimental scene with the emerging Italian avant-garde.
Installation and artwork views from Klaus Jorn’s 1988 exhibition The Other Side of Hyperbole at Alexander Wood Gallery, New York