Robert Jacobsen

Robert Jacobsen, who was born in Copenhagen in 1912, was a self-taught sculptor who began to carve wooden sculptures at the age of 18. In the years to follow he used a variety of materials and objects to shape his works, which in the middle of the 1930s could be seen in the form of doll-like objects. Robert Jacobsen took his inspiration from the world of ethnography, and his works were executed in materials of a more or less primitive origin. In later years, Robert Jacobsen’s interest in ethnography was to result in a remarkable collection of Africana.

From the beginning of the 1940s most of Jacobsen’s sculptures were executed in granite, but as this material began to cause him quite some problems, in the post-war years he changed over to the use of iron, which is both malleable and cheap to work with. Nevertheless, he made extremely variable use of the new material in the years to follow and his works ranged from linear, triangular designs light in their expression at the beginning of the 1950s to more controversial and denser forms in the middle of the 1950s. Subsequently, he created a new series named “dukkerne” (The Dolls), which consists of discarded spare parts of rough untreated iron combined in a more or less regular manner. The same story was repeated between 1958 and 1970, when slowly his sculptures moved towards stage-like tableaux, which we also find in the “Negativ Kraft” sculpture, and which you will find at the online auction.

The sculpture can be seen at our preview at Havnen on weekdays from 11 am to 5 pm and on Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm.   

The sculpture will be under the online hammer on Tuesday 15 November.