Asger Jorn Quotes

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

We are sparks that must glow as brightly as possible.

If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.

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

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

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

In the beginning was the image.

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.

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

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

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