Quotes from Asger Jorn

We like to learn all we need from earlier generations, but we have to find out for ourselves what we need; nobody else can do that for us.

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

We are not disillusioned because we have no illusions... What we have and what is our strength, is our joy in life... in all its amoral aspects. That is also the basis of our contemporary art.

During every really creative act, the artist finds himself homeless. To overcome this state he has to call up his last reserves of strength.

Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.

We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation.

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

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

Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today... It always feels tragic to see people labouring to saw off the branch they are sitting on.

To make the material speak to man in the name of man, this is the aim and reality of art.

The significance of something lies in its presence here and now. I don't care what it has been or what it will become. It is the experience of things that matters, the confrontation with things.