The Danish artist and designer Jakob Jørgensen aims for objects with a strong, sculptural expression. In his design he strives to create an expression that possesses the same depth as a work of art but which also fits naturally into everyday life as a functional object. Two major sources of inspiration lie behind the works of Jakob Joergensen – Constantin Brancusi’s endless Column and Joern utzon’s Opera House, in both of which a dialogue between the geometrical and the organic is orchestrated.
Jørgensen’s large-scale sculptures and lightings in iron are truly impressive, and their physical impact is challenging both the artist, while making them, and the spectator. By heating the iron tube up to 1000°C and forming it with a pressure of 100 tons, Jørgensen manages to give the metal tube unexpected fluid qualities. By the deformation of the metal tube, new sculptural dimensions gracefully emerge from the hard material. The tube sculptures are interesting in that when the cylinder, which is a geometric basic form, is deformed, all possible organic forms start occurring, such as tree buds or the shape it makes when it gets a sore in the bark and starts to encapsulate the wound.
A similar dialectic between geometrical and organic formseems to be at stake in the different chest of drawers, entitled Fjarill. ‘Fjärill’ means butterfly in Swedish, and indeed the chest of drawers seems to poetically paraphrase the transition from pupa to butterfly, through its closed geometrical form to its open, scattered shape. Through these various works, Jørgensen constantly seems to unveil how the organic lurks just behind the geometric. Another principle of metamorphosis is explored inthe modular bookcases, Arca, in which Jørgensen proposes a multitude of geometrical shapes, by repeating and connecting smaller elements of the same geometrical form over and over again.