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02.06 - 10.10 2012
Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, New York: Cobra is inextricably associated with major city centres. This is where the artists lived, met one another in cafés and worked in spaces they shared. They were part of the artistic avant-garde that brought colour to these cities in the 1940s and 1950s. Cobra Cities presents works from the collection, revealing the art scene of which the Cobra artists were a part.
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22.09 2012 - 13.01 2013
Long-awaited homage to the Dutch-Belgian master of post-war Matter Painting
The Cobra Museum presents the finest large-scale selection of paintings by Bram Bogart (1921-2012) seen in the Netherlands for many years. Bogart felt strongly connected to great artists - including William Turner, Constant Permeke, Auguste Herbin, Lucio Fontana, Zoltan Kemeny, Bart van der Leck and Jan Schoonhoven - and major works by these artists are included to illustrate their relationship with Bogarts overall artistic development. The museum shows amongst these the only painting by William Turner from a Dutch museum collection.
The exhibition is an homage to Bram Bogart whose monumental Matter Paintings won him exceptional international fame during his long and active career. For the first time the works created in recent decades are being shown in combination with his earlier work.
The exhibition is surprisingly multifaced, with a selection of paintings from 1939 through to 2009, but with a special focus on the 1950's. Bogarts painting bears witness to an exceptional sense of colour, material and composition, with a characteristic monumentality and innovative use of paint. The works moreover reveal Bogart's transition from figurative to abstract painting. Unique film footage, historic documents and photographs present a lively impression of this 'Master of Matter'.
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23.01 - 26.05 2013
In November, 1948, the Dane Asger Jorn, Belgians Joseph Noiret and
Christian Dotremont, and the Dutchmen Karel Appel, Corneille and
Constant all signed a declaration they had themselves composed. With
it, the establishment of Cobra became reality. The six artists spoke out
against an intellectual approach in their new practice of art and on behalf
of a simple principle of ‘Doing’. ‘Spontaneous creation’ from the material
itself, as well as working together, were important objectives. The joy
of total freedom and spontaneity had to offer a counterweight to the
nightmare of war.
In an attempt to liberate themselves from classical, bourgeois or
otherwise suffocating aesthetics, as well as moral traditions and
pretensions, the Cobra artists found inspiration in children’s drawings,
prehistoric artefacts, non-western artistic expressions, cartoons and
other manifestations of folk culture. Today, many associate Cobra with
spontaneously painted, highly colourful canvases. It was this spontaneity
that was initially so maligned, so that it would be decades before Cobra
became anchored in the history of European art.
In this presentation created by curator Hilde de Bruijne of the Cobra Museum collection, including works by Constant, Asger Jorn, Corneille and Karel Appel, the issue of
‘spontaneous creation’, which was so crucial for the Cobra artists, is
central. The artists were aware that ‘creating as spontaneously as a child’
was in fact impossible. Their quest for spontaneity was a consciously
chosen attitude, one that can even be seen as a strategy. They were
driven to it by their deep desire to establish something new and different
in place of the old established order.
In the Beginning Was the Image
The relationship between text and image played a role for Cobra
from the moment it was founded. There were of course poets among
the members. Visual artists made drawings to accompany poems and
the poets wrote texts for the visual work. Hugo Claus and especially
Lucebert had double talents, devoted both to poetry and painting.
Corneille also wrote both poems and prose.
The need for this collaboration and the interest in personal handwriting
as a pictorial element in a composition were particularly strong in Belgium.
It was Christian Dotremont who came up with the term, peinture-mots,
and he sometimes created these ‘painting words’ together with
Pierre Alechinsky and Asger Jorn.
The unconventional (collaborative) working method and combining text
with image were perfectly suited to Cobra and evolved in part from
the theories of Asger Jorn, who had been conscious of the visual and
material qualities of letters and symbols even before he met Christian
Dotremont. Back in 1944, Jorn wrote that writing and visual expression
were essentially the same thing. He reversed the traditional idea that the
story came fi rst, followed by the image. In Scandinavian mythology and
prehistory, he saw how pictorial motifs had lasted for centuries, while the
stories that accompanied them continued to change.
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