Galleria Ferrari, Verona

Allis Helleland, Jorgen Haugen Sorensen, A Biography:

"The big bronzes

Via Asger Jorn's art dealer Carlo Cardazzo Jorgen came in contact with the renowned bronze foundry Fonderia Artistica Veronese in Verona, where there was a long unbroken tradition of casting in bronze, and where the workers were amazingly good. Here he could cast both better and cheaper. With money on his pocket he got the optimal opportunity to further develop the bronze statue and build it in large size in the cire-perdue technique. He had met the sculptors Ghermandi, Somaini and Robert Müller and learned from them. It was a great challenge for him to work with the soft wax, where he felt that everything was possible. In the two sculptures 'As they became' and 'They who rise' Jorgen tried to show how different states of the human mind is expressed in the form of the sculpture. 'As they became' is a fully compressed form, where very little trickles out. How you feel when you are completely heartbroken. 'Those who rise' is almost like a flat oyster that is opening up and where different things emerge. How you feel, when you have come to your senses and can think clearly.

In a series of large bursting egg shaped sculptures of black oxided bronze, such as. The technical maiden (ill. P. 48) he continued the search for the sculpture's essence. In what they died of (ill. P. 47), the mold is blown, and you look into the sculpture's interior where everything is in disruption. The thing that interested him now, was to depict the shape of the immovable fixed shell, and portray the shell when it is in the process of breaking, because what is inside, is larger than the outer shape and, therefore, disrupts the shell, and erupts - with worlds of sensuality and lust, soft, organic forms producing new forms - becoming new life, quivering awaiting female gender and swollen genitals in the moment of redemption.

"When you look into a sculpture, there must be a great form inside. I seek to make the space inside the sculpture larger than the outer form ... "(JHS in interview in BT in 1963).

But it is also about the revelations about all the nasty, stored behind the beautiful surface, and which the artist must help make visible. The sculptures can be seen as a continuation of the slaughter scenes where it was gut that poured out of the slaughtered animals.

Both artistically and technically these bronze sculptures belong to the best in time and in the artist's production. They were shown at exhibitions in the prestigious Galleria Ferrari in Verona and the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, where artists such as Lucio Fontana, Cy Twombly, Piero Manzoni, Alberto Burri and Wilfredo Lam belonged. 

Milan and Verona was then the center for experimental art in Italy, and Jorgen sold works to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and important Italian and American private collectors. A photo shows the confident young artist standing in front of the gallery with five of the large bronzes in front of him, like a hunter with the hunted animals (Fig. P. 30).

Photographer @ Marianne Lautrop