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29.05 - 22.08 2010
While Danish artist Mogens Balle (Copenhagen 1921-1988) may be relatively unknown in the Netherlands, it is certainly not the case in Denmark and amongst Cobra circles. In recent years, international appreciation of his work has grown enormously. Now, in an extensive survey show, the Cobra Museum has brought the work of this major Danish Cobra artist to the Netherlands for the first time. The more than 80 artworks that make up this fanciful survey exhibition are the product of an inspired and an experimental artistic life.
Most of the artworks in the exhibition are oil paintings, and a number of these are round canvases. But the exhibition also contains ceramics, bronze sculptures, gouaches, sketches, as well as work made with other Cobra artists. Many of the collaborative works that Mogens Balle made with Christian Dotremont, for example, are on view. The earliest work in the show is dated 1938 and the most recent work is from 1988. True to the Cobra tradition, this travelling exhibition is itself a collaboration between three Danish art museums including the Carl-Henning Pedersen and Else Alfelts Museum in Herning. Similarly, works on view in this exhibition are on loan from numerous Danish galleries and private collections, as well as other foreign collections.
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12.06 - 10.10 2010
The Cobra Museum presents 'Masquerade: Cobra's Game with the Mask', an inspiring and multi-faceted summer exhibit about the relationship between Cobra and the mask: the mask as symbol for unrestrained and spontaneous art. The exhibition will show works from Cobra alongside tribal masks and will include art by Ejler Bile, Eugène Brands, Corneille, Sonja Ferlov, Egill Jacobsen, Robert Jacobsen, Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Anton Rooskens, Theo Wolvecamp, as well as work by the Cobra-associated artist Piet Ouborg. Special ethnographic items will also be exhibited: African masks from a Royal Danish Collection, from two authoritative museum collections and from the private collections of Brands, Corneille, Jan Nieuwenhuijs, Ouborg en Rooskens. This exhibition contains approximately 80 works, many of which are on loan from Danish and Dutch collectors.
The exhibition features Cobra artworks, primarily works dating from 1935 to the end of the 1950s, and includes paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and-- very uniquely– two of Eugène Brands' experimental masks from the late 1940's. One such experimental mask originates from the Cobra Museum's own collection. Another has only recently come to light and has been loaned. The diversity of 'Masquerade' is in part due to its ethnographic content, including masks from the private collection of Prince Henrik of Denmark; African masks from the Royal Museum for Middle Africa Tervuren (Belgium) and special objects from the collection of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.
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12.06 - 10.10 2010
Guillaume Le Roy was a printmaker. The technique he used was a means to an end, absolutely not the end itself. &quto;I make etchings when I want to make things that cannot be done in woodcuts, and vice versa. A printmaker works completely differently than a painter does. The painter - or the lithographer - adds something: the paint. Someone who makes etchings and woodcuts takes something away. Taking something away is more interesting to me than adding something." In contrast to Le Roy's earliest work, there is not a great profusion of colour, beyond black and white. "Good black and white is the most colourful thing there is. That is the paradox. A good black-and-white can be richer in colour because of the contrast in how it is built up, through extreme refinement, and through sensitive application of black and white." Colour, however, has not entirely disappeared. Subtly, here and there, Le Roy's prints have small accents in red, yellow or blue. Words were a source of inspiration for Guillaume Le Roy, as they have been for so many visual artists. He often borrowed from De Lautréamont, Mandelstamm or Baudelaire, writers who had a sombre, rebellious view of the world, one in which Le Roy recognized himself.
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