Cobra

THE COBRA GROUP

The group was founded on November 8, 1948, in the back room of the Notre-Dame Café in Paris. By the time it was officially disbanded in 1951, the movement included more than 50 members. With reference to generally comprehensible, “primitive” pictorial forms, the Cobra artists dared a hopeful new beginning for representational art and responded to a society undergoing reconstruction with new utopias. Their settings are towns and villages in Denmark, Belgium and Holland, with only occasional scene changes to Paris. The performers are painters and sculptors who love to travel and socialize, and their friends from the neighboring creative domains of literature, film, photography and architecture.

In dialogue

The Danish artists’ desire to encounter avant-garde positions, as well as their quest for universal artistic expression while maintaining their own cultural identity, pushes them to make contact with artists who develop similar ideas. The goal of developing a universal visual language with mythical content in dialogue with nature and based on the ancestral forms of the archaic cultures of Scandinavia is enthusiastically embraced and implemented by the Belgian and Dutch members of the group.

Unconventional

Cobra is profoundly unconventional. Its members, who come from Belgian surrealism and the experimental groups of Holland and Denmark, are opposed to bourgeois values and the tradition of artistic modernism. Their forms of expression see themselves as counter-positions to geometric abstraction and socialist realism. Cobra art is spontaneous and experimental. It receives important impulses from children’s drawings, the art of outsiders and primitive cultures. Its main design tools are bright colors and a rich playful imagination, which, coupled with humor and combative power, produces expressive images.

The Cobra exhibition shown at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung marked the movement’s 50th anniversary.

Thanks to the active support of Danish, Dutch and Belgian museums, private collectors and artists, around 200 works by the following artists were presented:

Pierre Alechinsky, Else Alfelt, Karel Appel, Jean-Michel Atlan, Ejler Bille, Eugène Brands, Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, Jacques Doucet, Sonja Ferlov-Mancoba, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, Robert Jacobsen, Asger Jorn, Lucebert, Erik Ortvad, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Reinhoud, Anton Rooskens, Shinkichi Tajiri, Raoul Ubac, Serge Vandercam, Theo Wolvecamp.