The world of things

Within the New Materialism discours, the emphasis lies on an emancipated thinking of matter, and the world of things is not presented as inanimate and passive, but as an active, dynamic world where things can act and have freedom of choice. Referring to, among other things, the climate crisis and developments in mobile network technology and artificial intelligence, contemporary artists and thinkers emphasize the urgency of this emancipatory perspective – a reconsideration of the relationship between man and matter. The Cobra Museum believes that the specific CoBrA perspective on the – now ubiquitous – phenomenon of New Materialism can yield crucial new insights into this subject.

CoBrA

By using the work of CoBrA artists and their contemporaries as a lens to look at the present and vice versa, we aim to learn something about the changed role of material, matter and materialism in art. For both modern and contemporary artists, the subject of materialism holds creative and political meaning: it enables them to say something about the world around them, and the relationship between humans and their surroundings. Working with and through matter, these artists look to unleash unexpected creative potential.