“Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modification Paintings”

Hailed by historian T.J. Clark as “the greatest painter of the 1950s,” Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973) was the cofounder of the CoBrA, a movement often described as the Continent’s answer to Abstract Expressionism. That’s true up to a point, though the members of CoBrA were less interested in the existential angst embraced by their New York counterparts than they were in the possibilities of artistic primitivism. A good example can be found in this group show, organized around works Jorn first exhibited in 1959: A series of thrift-store canvases, painted over with abstract gestures and crude figurative flourishes. Merging vandalism and found object aesthetics, these “modification paintings,” as Jorn dubbed them, are exhibited alongside contributions by 30 artists whose appropriative strategies follow in the artist’s hugely influential footsteps.