Galerie Børge Birch

Jorgen Haugen Sorensen, 1972: 'Every year for the past 12 years, I have had an agreement with Borge for an exhibition. The distance between the exhibition and the agreement became larger and larger as time went on. Until I, as the only option had to make a portrait of the situation. Every single piece of bent metal (wax) is part of the agreement, a part of the motif. Therefore, I see the thing as one thing with different composition possibilities. It also became clearer to me that the sculptures is something I have certainly never made, but figures - that is portraits - and thus PORTRAIT OF AN OLD AGREEMENT '.

Allis Helleland, Jørgen Haugen Sørensen - A Biography:

"... It was for the exhibition Portrait of an old agreement in 1972 in the newly rebuilt Galerie Birch in Admiral Street, where Jorgen 12 years earlier had overwhelmed the Copenhagen art scene so completely with his exhibition of abstract bronzes and sculptures. The new exhibition consisted of twelve pieces, most of them sculptural landscapes in several parts, that could be moved around. All cast in the finest bronze at the skilled bronze casters in Verona. But in an effort to break the neatness, the individual parts were of organic and crumpled forms patinated in a rustic yellowish color, so they looked like piles of scrap.

Jørgen's idea was to find out what happens when the entire sculpture is blown and dissolved in many details, and each of the released portions have equal emphasis and value. He called them portraits and explained that they were portraits of a state of mind, the wreckage of a ruined world, with which he exhibited his powerlessness. Here, he probabaly alluded to both the overall world situation with the Vietnam War, youth rebellion and dissolution of bourgeois norms and authorities, and to his personal life situation with a broken marriage and divorce children, and probably to his own artistic situation, where he in the previeous years had broken his sculpture all down.

Again, the exhibition at Birch was a great success, artistically and saleswise. The works were sold to museums and collectors, and the reviewers were enthusiastic and agreed that the show was "one of the most pertinent contemporary art, which long had been seen in Copenhagen." (Hans Edvard Norregaard Nielsen in the newspaper Information).

The works for the exhibition was photographed in the apartment in Via Valdonega 15a Verona by Jette Mühlendorph.