Jørgen Haugen Sørensen

In 2014 Haugen Sørensen donated a significant part of his private collection to Bornholms Kunstmuseum.

The post-war and contemporary sculptor has been hailed as the greatest Danish sculptor since Bertel Thorvaldsen. He received several important distinctions for his works through the years, such as the Eckerberg Medal in 1969 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1979. In 1958 he was selected to represent Denmark at the Biennale di Venezia. Sørensen's sculptures have been placed all around the world.

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen has spent most of his life abroad, living in a voluntary exile in Southern Europe. The 1960s he spent in Paris, France and Verona, Italy before finally settling down in the artists' town Pietrasanta in Tuscany from 1971. Despite developing a style far removed from his Danish contemporaries, Haugen Sørensen has always been highly present in his native country in exhibitions as well as in the artistic debate.

After an interruption at the end of the 1960s when he turned to films, he returned to sculpture making use of marble, often combining different colours and finishes, as can be seen in his decorative work outside the School of Journalism in Aarhus. Other important works include the geometrical Huset der slikker solskin (The House which Licks Sunshine, 1980) for the Danish Institute in Rome, Dumhedens store flod (Stupidity's Great River, 1995) in Ribe, and Sorg (Sorrow, 1990) for the French University in Istanbul. His later work often consists of large angular shapes with rough surfaces as his three sculptures for the University of Lund (1994) and his 7 meters tall Colossus at the Amager Beach Park in Copenhagen.

After his debut at Charlottenborg's spring exhibition in 1953, he rapidly gained a reputation as a sculptor who crafted works of the human body and of animals with intense expressiveness and realism. His scenes of butchery became central to his work.

Since his debut in 1953 he shifted without any formal training or schooling between materials and modes of expression within the sculptural sphere. His artistic language evolved throughout his career, but the production always kept an abstract core within its diversity. He primarily worked with sculptures even though he was also an accomplished draughtsman.

At the end of the 1950s during a stay on the island of Bornholm, he entered a more abstract phase, experimenting with tiled pipes and other ceramic products, although he maintained elements of the body and other recognizable phenomena. During the dramatic years of the Algerian War, he settled in Paris creating figurative sculptures in bronze from 1959 to 1963. They depict scarred, torn organic forms reflecting a reality of cruelty, fear and sexuality. He traveled widely to Italy, Germany, Spain and Yugoslavia, developing a style which was far removed from Danish culture. At the end of the 1960s, he often created compositions made up of several smaller sculptures, sometimes using materials such as plastic or textiles, occasionally borrowing elements from other sculptors.

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen's inspiration stemmed from myriad places. From Francis Goya's depictions of the Spanish peoples suffering during the Franco rule to Pablo Picasso's anti-war oil painting Guernica from 1937 and his own memories of childhood visits in the slaughterhouses in the Copenhagen Meat Packing District and readings of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five from 1969. Haugen Sørensen studied Gian Lorenzo Bernini's craftsmanship and marble sculptures, the Mediterranean crafts traditions and he also took away ideas from his meeting with the abstract expressionist art movement in Paris and CoBrA in the 1950s.

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen (3 October 1934 – 18 November 2021) was one of Denmark's most eminent sculptors. He had his artistic debut at the acclaimed and prestigious Spring Exhibition (Forårsudstillingen) at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen in 1953. Haugen Sørensen was a member of the artistic union Decembristerne and the artist collective Grønningen, as well as Veksølund in Denmark.