Two paintings by Asger Jorn that could hardly be more different will headline the modern and contemporary section of Bruun Rasmussen's final live auction of the year, held on 18 November. The Danish house is presenting the works together precisely because the contrast between them maps the breadth of Jorn's practice, from playful optimism to a period of serious illness and creative struggle.

The earlier canvas dates from 1938, shortly after Jorn came back to Denmark from Paris, where he had studied with Fernand Léger the previous year after riding a motorcycle through Europe. A butterfly moves across a deep blue sky in the picture, and the house notes that Jorn applied paint with an unconventional tool, a dental spatula, giving the surface a rich, tactile quality. The architect Thorkild Jensen bought the work directly from the artist in the year it was made, and his son later recalled Jorn explaining that the butterfly had flown off to greet another insect trapped in a bottle.

The second painting, Livets gang, or The Course of Life, was made in 1951 while Jorn was being treated for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Silkeborg. He had reached Denmark that May after years of unsettled life in Paris, where he had helped hold the CoBrA movement together but remained short of money and recognition. At first glance the canvas reads as pure abstraction, yet closer looking reveals small figures tangled together, as if a fevered mind were setting a whole universe spinning.

The same sale also includes further CoBrA material, among it a 1946 work by Else Alfelt, a 1961 painting by Lucebert, and a 1972 collaboration by Pierre Alechinsky and Christian Dotremont. Together, the group offers a compact survey of a movement that prized spontaneity, and of the artist who did more than most to keep it alive.