SKÄRHAMN.- The Nordic Watercolour Museum has opened a summer exhibition devoted to two of Denmark’s most important postwar artists, Asger Jorn and Per Kirkeby, bringing together watercolors and drawings that reveal the experimental force behind their larger artistic practices.

On view through September 6, 2026, the exhibition explores how Jorn and Kirkeby, despite belonging to different generations and working from distinct art-historical positions, shared a deep interest in the expressive power of painting and the mysterious inner life of the image.

The show focuses on watercolor and drawing, media that allow visitors to see the artists thinking on paper. Rather than presenting these works as secondary to painting, the museum highlights them as independent fields of discovery, where gesture, rhythm, structure and movement come to the surface with unusual immediacy.

Jorn, born in 1914, was one of the central figures of the European avant-garde and a co-founder of CoBrA, the postwar movement known for its spontaneous, energetic and anti-academic approach to art. His works in the exhibition reflect his belief in creative freedom and his resistance to convention and control. In his watercolors and drawings, color, line and gesture become vehicles for humor, critique and imagination.

Kirkeby, born in 1938, approached image-making from another direction. Trained as a geologist, he developed a visual language shaped by nature, time and layered structures. His works from the 1980s and 1990s, represented in the exhibition, suggest landscapes in formation, where sediment, memory and painterly rhythm seem to shift across the surface.

Together, the two artists offer different but related visions of a changing world. Jorn’s images pulse with immediacy and rebellion, while Kirkeby’s unfold through accumulated layers and geological time. Both artists used drawing and watercolor not simply as preparatory tools, but as ways to investigate how images take shape and how art can respond to transformation.

The exhibition was developed in collaboration with art historian Per Jonas Storsve. During the same period, the Nordic Watercolour Museum is also presenting two exhibitions drawn from its own collection.