Jørgen Haugen Sørensen, That’s Why They Call them Dogs

On Friday June 12, opening of “That’s Why They Call Them Dogs” – a survey of the late Danish sculptor Jørgen Haugen Sørensen’s dog sculptures and reliefs.

The exhibition “That’s Why They Call Them Dogs” surveys Jørgen Haugen Sørensen’s long-standing work with the dog as a motif and existential figure. The exhibition is curated by the artist’s widow, Eli Benveniste.

In connection with the presentation of the international sculpture prize Fratelli Rosselli, Pietrasanta 2016, the Italian art historian and art critic Bruno Corà wrote the following about Haugen Sørensen’s dog sculptures:

Those Dogs of Sorensen

If you look, even briefly, at the works Jørgen Haugen Sørensen has been working on in recent years, you can’t help but notice two or three inescapable aspects: first, the material used in the creation of his latest sculptures is clay. Sørensen shapes it as if he were the first man to do so. He does this with a desire to discover its properties and to achieve what his imagination suggests, uninhibited by any norm other than freedom.

Observing his forms, recently almost all anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, one grasps another evident aspect: he concerns himself with bodies, with certain body parts —the legs, the arms, the buttocks, the head, etc. Personified or evoked by the emblem of the skull or skeleton, this is always in action, and his theater is humanity pursued, seized, raped by its fury, its  insatiable greed. The  narrative, whose moral Sørensen quickly outlines, is extremely eloquent. One need not have read Heidegger or Celan to recognize its bitter presence in human destiny and now in Sørensen’s sculpture, which never ceases to manifest itself in new forms.

The other distinctive aspect of Sørensen’s recent work, in fact, is the striking presence of animals, especially dogs. It’s clear that his penetrating observation of their postures, their habits, their needs, their suffering, and their very animal nature deeply engages him because it does not lead to any humanization of their behavior.

They express a vast feeling of existential nonsense, a panicky and ultimately dramatic reality, and a pervasive restlessness as they lie in involuntary apathy and without the hope or awareness of possible change.

Ultimately, Sørensen, like Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog, has transferred those unspeakable feelings into his own and ours, thus instilling the not unreasonable suspicion that the dogs’ physical features and expressions are similar to ours and therefore, ultimately, that these dogs could ultimately be ourselves – or speak about us – in another guise. Anyone who has lived with or loved a dog knows what I’m talking about, and above all, knows what dogs tell us without using words.”

However, Sørensen also shapes clay today because—as he himself states—no one, or almost no one, wants to do it anymore, and for him, instead, there’s a need to repeat this experience to see if it can still be done with interesting results. To see if through it one can visualize moods, energies, and anxieties: these emerge from its elaboration, thought and, above all, sensitivity and reveal themselves. 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, sculpture for Sørensen was something else. Beginning in 1959, Sørensen freed himself from every vestige of naturalism he had followed until then, embracing an abstraction that was already widespread in Europe, which he appropriated, developing his own modalities and forms. This is not the occasion to review his entire artistic career, which has already been extensively reviewed historically and critically, but it certainly provides an opportunity to highlight his qualities and the differences in his plasticity from the contemporary sensibility. Something subtly violent, generating rebellion and internal responses, profoundly pervades the times we live in. In different ways, artists like Francis Bacon or Bruce Nauman have taken various types of animals as the subjects of their metaphors of pathos and the human condition. The otherness of their existential destiny, the inability to denounce the abuse, misunderstanding, and sometimes devastation—Sørensen’s hellish and pathetic dogs thus appear as an eloquent sermon whose meaning or significance, when faced with his works, is entirely implicit and unequivocal. 

Once again, it is not a question of aesthetically attributing the quality of Sorensen’s plasticity to realism or abstraction, but rather of grasping the full effectiveness of the way in which clay, through the hand of an artist like him, can resurface as a self-reflecting and newly credible piety.

Jørgen Haugen Sørensen, That’s Why They Call them Dogs  [Project Room]
Hans Alf Gallery, Holbergsgade 8, 1057 Copenhagen
hansalf.com