Jørgen Haugen Sørensen

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.

[4] 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.

[5] 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.

[1] 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.

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.