Our find of this week is this dynamic painting “Quand la lumière se fait” (When the light happens/occurs) by Danish rebel Asger Jorn. It is one of the most striking works in the highly anticipated CoBrA auction at Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers on Bredgade.

Asger Jorn, "Quand la lumière se fait". 1969. Oil on canvas. 81 x 100 cm. Price est.: € 270,000-335,000 Bruun Rasmussen
Asger Jorn, “Quand la lumière se fait”. 1969. Oil on canvas. 81 x 100 cm. Price est.: € 270,000-335,000 Bruun Rasmussen

Jorn was educated in Paris at Fernand Léger‘s Académie Contemporaine, where he turned from figurative to abstract art. He worked with Kandinsky and Le Corbusier, perfecting his personal style of violently dynamic brushwork and expert abstractization, intensified with the impasto technique and bold colours. After the WWII, along with Christian Dotremont and Constant, he founded CoBrA, a European post war avant-garde art movement (COpenhagen, BRussels, Amsterdam) which unified a war-torn geography. CoBrA group artists were in search of an unconscious, a liberated anti-aesthetic imagery inspired by children’s drawings. Unlike their American counterparts, the Abstract Expressionists, CoBrA painters rejected dehumanized abstractization. They used subhuman figures that represented fear or humor and an interplay between the conscious and unconscious.

The CoBrA auction at Bruun Rasmussen presents an almost complete range of artistic media such as painting, print, sculpture and ceramics, with more than 100 works focusing especially on Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky, along with Karel Appel, Carl Henning Pedersen and Egill Jacobsen. The auction takes place at Bruun Rasmussen on Bredgade 33, Copenhagen, on December 6, 16:00

Photo courtesy of Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers.