Jörgen Nash

After the war, Nash joined CoBrA (1948-1951), the postwar movement that brought together artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam around shared convictions about spontaneity, raw imagery, and collective working methods. His paintings from this period carry the movement's characteristic directness - loose figuration, vigorous brushwork, faces and figures that feel pulled from dreams or folklore. But Nash was constitutionally restless. By the late 1950s, he and Jorn were moving toward the Situationist International, drawn to its fusion of artistic practice and social critique.

In 1960, Nash and Jorn bought a farm called Drakabygget, eight kilometers north of Örkelljunga in Skane, and founded the Situationist Bauhaus there. The farm became a genuine commune - at its peak, around ten artists lived on site simultaneously, and over the decades several hundred passed through. Nash edited a journal from the farm, also called Drakabygget, addressing art, social philosophy, and anti-authoritarian ideas. In 1962, after a split with Guy Debord's faction of the Situationist International, Nash led the Scandinavian section into expulsion. He and collaborators including Hardy Strid and Jens Jørgen Thorsen signed the Drakabygget Declaration and continued independently through the Second Situationist International.

The act Nash became most notorious for happened on April 24, 1964, when he and other members of the Bauhaus Situationniste sawed off the head of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue in a public anti-consumerism demonstration. The head was never recovered. It was the kind of action Nash understood as art continuous with protest - a gesture that could not be sold, catalogued, or contained. He received honorary artist status from the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 1963, the same year before the Mermaid incident, a recognition that arrived in the middle of his most provocative period.

His visual work spans oil painting, color lithography, gouache, enamel on sheet metal, and linocut, moving between vivid figuration and looser compositional experiments. Recurring subjects include faces, mythological figures (Loke, the Viking), musicians (Saxofonkungen), and portraits of cultural figures. He also wrote prolifically - poetry collections, novels, and art-theoretical texts throughout his life. Nash died at Drakabygget on May 17, 2004. The Drakabygget Konsthall was inaugurated in 2002, and the farm continues as a cultural venue today.

At Swedish auction, Nash appears primarily in Skane - at Garpenhus Auktioner, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Crafoord Auktioner, Björnssons Auktionskammare, and Skanes Auktionsverk, reflecting his deep regional ties. His 34 indexed items include oils, lithographs, and mixed-media works. The highest realized price in the database is 18,026 SEK for 'Resa till Orienten' (1970), an oil on canvas. His prints and graphics typically sell in the 400-3,000 SEK range, making him accessible to collectors interested in the Scandinavian avant-garde.