Danish Artist Vandalizes Iconic Asger Jorn Painting of a Duckling – ARTnews.com

Danish artist Ibi-Pippi Orup Hedegaard was arrested Friday in link with the vandalizing of a famed painting by Asger Jorn, just one of the most popular Danish artists of the earlier century. Gurus at the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark, the place the portray is completely housed, are at this time examining the hurt.

The vandalism commenced to circulate extensively on social media Sunday simply because some viewed it as a appropriate-wing protest. In statements next the incident, Ibi-Pippi, who goes by his 1st name, framed the act as just one intended generally to spur a debate about authorship.

The painting, The Disquieting Duckling (1959), depicts a silent countryside dwelling with a large duck looming more than it. Jorn’s follow regularly involved appropriating all set-created imagery and using it as a canvas for his individual creations. As with several of his paintings, Jorn obtained the pastoral portray for Duckling and then crudely painted the duck over it in garish tones. The term made use of by scholars to describe Jorn’s system is “détournement,” a core aspect of the leftist Situationist Intercontinental movement, with which Jorn was affiliated.

Is effective these as The Disquieting Duckling made Jorn the most popular artist of the CoBrA team, which sought to implode the divide concerning great and negative when it arrived to art-making. The team was energetic amongst 1948 and 1951.

Ibi-Pippi claimed that his act was a continuation of Jorn’s inventive fears in a assertion on Friday posted to his Fb. That working day, Ibi-Pippi allegedly went into the Museum Jorn, signed his name in black everlasting marker, and affixed an graphic of himself to the portray. He was arrested shortly afterward.

“If you’re around, you can go and admire my new function,” Ibi-Pippi wrote on Facebook.

Video clip that appeared to display Ibi-Pippi pasting a photograph of himself to the Jorn portray was streamed dwell on Facebook by Patrioterne Går Reside, a ideal-wing webpage that has previously posted videos and textual content advocating for a “non-Muslim” Denmark. According to the Danish publication DR, the artist Uwe Max Jensen, who has provoked controversy for carrying out in blackface and who has posted about his proper-wing views on social media, can be witnessed in the Patrioterne Går Dwell online video taking photos of the vandalism and the wall text, and then going for walks out of the museum with Ibi-Pippi.

Jensen posted a number of occasions about Ibi-Pippi’s vandalism on Fb this weekend. In one particular publish, he compared the act to artist Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s the latest dumping of a bust of an 18th-century Danish king into a river, in what she labeled an anti-colonial protest.

Jacob Thage, director of the Museum Jorn, told DR on Friday that the establishment was operating to restore The Disquieting Duckling. He said at the time that it was “too early to tell” irrespective of whether the painting could be salvaged because the glue utilised by Ibi-Pippi is “very tricky to get rid of.”

A museum spokesperson did not instantly answer to an ARTnews request for remark.

Following an interrogation conducted just after his arrest, Ibi-Pippi was released. A obligation officer with the regional police informed DR that the case was getting addressed as a criminal one and that an investigation was becoming undertaken.

In an job interview with the community Television set2 Østylland on Sunday, Ibi-Pippi appeared to say that he did not mean for his vandalism to have possibly lengthy-term implications. He claimed that he chose the wrong tube of glue when pasting on his have portrait to the Jorn painting.

“I am sincerely sorry that the get the job done has been mutilated to the extent it has become,” he claimed. “It was not actually my intention.”