Asger Jorn Quotes

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.

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

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

We are sparks that must glow as brightly as possible.

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

My work is based on a tradition quite distinct from the Eckersberg tradition, a Nordic line of development that had never been clearly and consistently defined in the literature on art. This line is not a straight one; it has the strangest and most fascinating twists and curves, and includes such artists as Edvard Munch, Ernest Josephson, Hill, Hansen Jacobsen, Johannes Holbek, Jens Lund, and Emile Nolde. Not all of them equally well known.

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

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

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, but ourselves as human animals.

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

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

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

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

Being an artist is being an isolated individual.

The great work of art is the complete banality, and the fault with most banalities is that they are not banal enough. Banality here is not infinite in its depth and consequence, but rests on a foundation of spirituality and aesthetics.

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.

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

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

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.

I act with full responsibility and after extensive reflection.

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.

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