Friday August 16th, Hans Alf Gallery invites everyone to join the opening of the exhibition "Stone upon Stone" - a survey of Jørgen Haugen Sørensen's granite sculptures from the 80's and early 90's.
Since Jørgen Haugen Sørensen's first solo in Holbergsgade in 2014, Hans Alf Gallery has exhibited everything from bronze sculptures and drawings to glazed stoneware in various forms and colors, as well as reliefs in bronze, ceramic, and jesmonite. However, the most acclaimed part of the renowned sculptor's production—the sublime stone sculptures that put him on the map internationally and which can be seen in places like Seoul, Ankara, Yorkshire, Portugal, and all round our own modest capitol—have never been exhibited in the gallery. Until now.
On Friday, August 16th, we open the doors to a small but carefully curated exhibition of Haugen Sørensen's stone works. With the help of the sculptor's widow, Eli Benveniste, we have selected a series of sculptures from the 1980s and early 1990s that tell the story of an artist who expressed himself freely and effortlessly in virtually all materials.
Jørgen Haugen Sørensen first encountered stone in 1971, when he was commissioned to create a large-scale work for the School of Journalism in Aarhus, Denmark. It began with a piece of red marble in Verona, a material he initially rejected as a symbol of the self-congratulatory, elitist and exalted sculptural tradition he had sought to distance himself from. However, it quickly became clear to everyone, including the artist himself, that he mastered the soft marble with the same natural virtuosity as all the other materials he had worked with. Haugen Sørensen was hooked. Over the following decade, he increasingly devoted himself to marble and other types of stone, and the results of his efforts during this period can still be seen in many Danish museums, public spaces, and around the world.
Throughout the 1980s, the hard, stubborn granite became Haugen Sørensen's favorite material. His sculptures changed in form and expression: while they had previously focused on contrasts between the soft and the angular, the organic and the industrial, his works now became increasingly brutal, unforgiving, and concrete. Haugen Sørensen's granite constructions were not meant to convey any particular message or serve as abstractions of a given idea or philosophy; they were defiant monuments, frozen war, ideal spaces in themselves. In a conversation with Sir Peter Murray, the long-time artistic director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Jørgen Haugen Sørensen expressed his disdain for grand statements about "the inherent truth of the stone" or attempts to "listen to the stone." If a stone could speak, Jørgen said, it would simply say, "Leave me alone."
For Haugen Sørensen, working with granite was the antithesis of modeling in clay. While clay was fleeting and pliable, allowing him to fantasize and improvise in the moment, working with granite was hard and relentless, a punishing task that required careful planning, massive machines, and immense physical effort. Clay allowed him to reproduce the external world in long, soft movements. Granite, on the other hand, forced him, in his own words, to work like a poet, constantly cutting away, refining, and reworking the material until he reached its essence. For this reason, Haugen Sørensen also saw his granite sculptures as projections of an inner world: ideal spaces, concrete balance, and dialogue without language.
During the 1990s, clay once again became Jørgen Haugen Sørensen's primary medium of expression. Working with the heavy stones had become too exhausting for the seasoned artist, who was now in his 60s, and he missed the more forgiving nature of clay. In the late 2000s, Haugen Sørensen briefly returned to granite when the New Carlsberg Foundation commissioned a monumental work to be installed at Amager Strandpark. The sculpture, inaugurated in 2011 and named "The Colossus," was Denmark's largest sculpture at the time, standing 7.2 meters tall and weighing 69 tons. "The Colossus" became Jørgen Haugen Sørensen's last stone sculpture. He passed away on November 18, 2021, in his home in Pietrasanta.
"Stone upon Stone" opens August 16 in the main gallery and will be on view through September 13.
