exhibitions

Piet Ouborg. Soloist

12.12 - 14.03 2010

The multisided oeuvre of the important Dutch artist, Piet Ouborg (1893-1956) and today's renewed interest, in the Netherlands and internationally, for his personal and pioneering work have inspired this major retrospective exhibition. The Cobra Museum feels even more motivated to honour this important artist because of the connection between aspects of Ouborg's work and the artists who participated in Cobra and Vrij Beelden, two historically important concerns of this museum. With about 60 paintings and drawings, the exhibition covers the entire development of Piet Ouborg's work, from his earliest work in the Dutch East Indies and later, after 1938, when he settled in the Netherlands, to his late work from the mid-and late 1950s. The exhibition gives special focus to the mature work of the 1950s.

Rob Voerman. Human Comfort

30.01 - 30.05 2010

Where in the 1950s and ‘60s, Constant Nieuwenhuys developed his revolutionary Nieuw Babylon concept as an achievable utopia, Rob Voerman (b. 1966) now creates informal, improvised architectural constructions that partly evolved from his criticism of existing cultural, social and financial systems. Voerman creates spatial architectural models and assemblages, an architecture of fictitious societies within remote or busy urban structures. He also expresses these ideas in watercolours and prints. Voerman's spatial constructions are built up of organic materials, worked in bricolage-like methods. In an extension of the models, the watercolours and prints show spherical impressions of urban and industrial landscapes. Rob Voerman's work is not simply dark. It also offers openings towards a different approach to our own time.

Spelling Dystopia
Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani

30.01 - 25.04 2010

Several places that were once hallmarks, centers of political culture, avant-garde art, and social developments, have become blind spots in contemporary society. Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani want to bring them back to today’s consciousness in their altered, mystified phases: not utopian, not obsolete, but rather not yet redefined.

The film ‘Spelling Dystopia’ focuses on the public perception of the uninhabited island Hashima near Nagasaki, which has a vivid history. Hashima has been an important location for Japanese coal-mining until 1974. It is a man-made artificial island, based on the use of concrete. During the World War II it was a work camp for war prisoners from Korea and China. In the 60s it became the most dense place on earth. With a size of only 160 x 450 m the island was inhabited by over 5000 people in its best times, working in the Mitsubishi-owned coalmine. The density of the population was higher than in Tokyo’s most crowded parts today. From 1974 the island was abandoned. In the year 2000 it became the film location of a science fiction blockbuster ‘Battle Royale’. The younger generation started to know the place mostly from movies, mangas and video games

Fisher and El Sani focus on the transfer of collective memories. In ‘Spelling dystopia’ they combine the memories of a former inhabitant of the island with the narration of two high school students who recall fragments of the movie ‘Battle Royale’. Thereby, the island appears almost as their fantasy, an imaginary playground for their games, where various images and layers of reality and fiction already got in a state of mingling.

Nina Fischer (1965, Emden) and Maroan el Sani (1966, Duisberg) work together since 1993. They live and work in Berlijn and Sapporo (Japan).

Johannes Schwartz. Passion

27.03 - 24.05 2010

Johannes Schwartz presents a new series of photographs, entitled Passion. Over the last year, he has photographed a recently abandoned house. The result is a series of film-like moments in a sober interior that seems unchanged since the 1950s. The furniture and objects are a reflection of the personality of someone who lived in the house for many years.

In all of his series’, Johannes Schwartz works according to a fixed formula, in which the subject is first determined and subsequently explored in depth. Although his interior photographs are registrations of an existing situation as he found it, they give the impression of being meticulously staged arrangements.