Archives: Tentoonstellingen

100 years Asger Jorn: Traces, The Secret of Art, A Way of Making

by Fredrique Bergholtz & Maria Pask

From the Guggenheim Collection to the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, celebrates a vital phase in the history of the Guggenheim Museum.

From the Guggenheim Collection to the Cobra Museum of Modern Art celebrates a vital stage in the history of the Guggenheim Museum, a decade in which post-war modern art and society radically changed. The Cobra Museum presents art that was purchased with foresight in the 50s by Johnson Sweeney for the Guggenheim Museum. Sweeney spoke of ‘tastebreakers’: artists that ‘break open and shift our artistic boundaries’. Some of these works of art were shown in 1959 during the legendary opening exhibition in the iconic building by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Cobra Museum of Modern Art will exhibit 51 paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in which a selection from the core collection of mid-century art from the famous museum can be seen in the Netherlands for the first time. Apart from American greats such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Sam Francis, there are also works by lesser-known international pioneers like William Baziotes, José Guerrero, Conrad Marca-Relli, Georges Mathieu, Kenzo Okada, and artists who participated in Cobra: Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn.

From the Guggenheim Collection to the Cobra Museum in the media:

“Spectacular exhibition. […] The need to paint ‘freely’ still splatter from the canvases.”
Trouw *****

“You couldn’t often see your Pollock, Alechinsky or Reinhardt this good before. Well-chosen. Hung splendidly.”
Volkskrant *****

Het Parool ****

‘Guggenheim naar Amstelveen’ (Guggenheim to Amstelveen), interview with American curator Tracey Bashkoff, in NRC (Dutch).

Kamabade’s ‘The big we have everything to lose’ show

Kamabade, consisting of Artists David Bade and Kamagurka, spend two weeks in and outside of the het Cobra Museum to work on their Monument of loss. With a mobile ‘loss’ unit and an old ambulance, Kamabade drives through Amstelveen to a landfill, a nursing home, the Town Center Plaza and community homes to collect the stories, objects and the ‘loss’ from the inhabitants of Amstelveen. With this they build their monument in the museum. During construction, visitors are welcome to watch and share.

Ambulancier is a great profession!

Brutal Vitality, a new museal installation in 5 stories in which Bank & Rau convey the story of CoBrA to visitors in an entirely unique way.

The Danish artists duo Bank & Rau (Lone Bak and Tanja Rau) from Copenhagen has been invited by the Cobra Museum to create a contemporary collection presentation coming from their unique vision. The collection of the museum, the associated stories and the history of the CoBrA movement with its archival pieces are the building blocks with which Bank & Rau worked. They extended it with their own artworks, inspired by the collection. This forms Brutal Vitality, a new museal installation in 5 stories in which they convey the story of CoBrA to visitors in an entirely unique way.

Comprehensive in the practice of artist Bank & Rau are handcrafted and folk elements. By shifting aside the tradition, and everything that we take for granted in a museum, Bank & Rau is attempting to reshape the traditional museum presentation.

The exhibition Brutal Vitality by Bank & Rau was created under the Open Collections Program. The Open Collection program of the Cobra Museum is a practical research in which contemporary makers were invited to open the collection of the museum to provide a new impulse. Within this program there have been collaborations with Maria Pask / Frederique Bergholtz and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. De Open Collection program has been made possible thanks to the Mondriaan Fonds. The Danish Arts Council, SVFK (Danish Art Workshop) and SKF (Danish Art Foundation) support the presentation of Bank & Rau.

On the first floor we show our Cobra art collection in a new presentation, including all Cobra artist such as Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Constant and Pierre Alechinsky. This presentation includes an extra focus on the relation that Cobra artist had with music.

Anette Brolenius is a portrait and documentary photographer focusing on social issues, in particular human and women’s rights.

At the Cobra Museum, during the exhibition of Kati Horna, the series UNSUNG by the Swedish photographer Anette Brolenius can be seen. The UNSUNG series contains about 130 portraits (and growing), made over a period of 5 years. These are black and white portraits of women’s rights activists. Twenty portraits are shown at the Cobra Museum. It has previously been exhibited in Stockholm, Paris and in Pakistan. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Committee of International Womens Day (IWD) in Amstelveen. On March 8th (International Women’s Day) a symposium will be held in teh Cobra Museum in which one of the portraited woman: Peninah Musyimi or Safe Spaces Nairobi (Kenya) is keynote speaker.

Ata Kandó: Hungarian refugees and Slave or Dead

The Cobra Museum shows work by Ata Kandó in line with the Kati Horna overview. Just like Kati Horna, Ata Kandó was a committed documentary photographer, Hungarian by origin and trained by József Pécsi.

Ata Kandó believed a good photograph had both an artistic and a social aspect, and the best photographers were those who optimally combined these two qualities. On the one hand, her work is characterised by her depiction of the personal, intimate life of her children and of animals. On the other hand, she profiled herself as a socially engaged photographer. Kandó’s socially engaged visual narratives, for example of Hungarian refugees and inhabitants of the Amazon forest (Slave or Dead), fit in with the humanistic documentary tradition of the 1950s. Both series can be seen at the Cobra Museum alongside the work of Kati Horna and Eva Besnyö.

Hungarian-born Ata Kandó completed a training in photography in Budapest in the 1930s with the then well-known photographer József Pécsi (1889-1956), who also trained Eva Besnyö and Kati Horna. After this, she and Gyula Kandó, her first husband she went to Paris trying to build a life as photographer.  Female photographers were barely accepted at that time. She did not get a work permit and worked illegally. War photographer and Magnum co-founder Robert Capa, a friend of Kandó, found work for her there. In 1950, she met the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken in the dark room of this photographic cooperative, and they married in 1954. In Paris they were introduced to the world of the Cobra movement and the Vijftigers, but other artists also found their way to the couple’s apartment. However, due to a constant lack of money, reality was harsh and building a social life proved almost impossible. In 1954, Kandó and Van der Elsken left for Amsterdam.

In the 1960s and 1970s Kandó mainly taught photography at the art academy. After her early retirement, the photographer immigrated to the United States. As a result, her work disappeared into the background. In the Netherlands Kandó did not enjoy the same reputation as her compatriot and friend Eva Besnyö, whose work is also shown in this exhibition alongside the work of Kati Horna.

 In the 1970s Eva Besnyö joined Dolle Mina. In recording the campaigns and demonstrations of this women’s movement, she put new principles into practice. From these works, it shows that she wanted to use her photographic work for social change. The series Dolle Mina is on show at the Cobra Museum, in relation to the work of Kati Horna en Ata Kando.

In the post-war period Eva Besnyö was involved in the foundation of the Gebonden Kunstenaars federatie (GKf), an art federation chaired by the later famous museum director Willem Sandberg, and was especially involved with the Department of Photography. Shortly after the bombing of Rotterdam, she photographed the city in ruins. She looked back at this with reticence: “I am still ashamed of that. Because they were beautiful pictures and you should not take beautiful pictures of devastation.” She thought a photograph should activate people. “After the war, I even distanced myself from the idea that photos should be beautiful. I had always beautifully lit and framed everything and I certainly didn’t want to continue with that super aesthetic work.” In the 1970s she joined Dolle Mina. In recording the campaigns and demonstrations of this women’s movement, she put her new principles into practice. From these works, it shows that she wanted to use her photographic work for social change. The series Dolle Mina is on show at the Cobra Museum, in relation to the work of Kati Horna en Ata Kando.

Eva Besnyö, raised in a Jewish intellectual family in Budapest, trained with József Pécsi. After completing her training, she left for Berlin, like Kati Horna, at the age of twenty, where she continued to learn the trade in photo studios. As an independent photographer she made portraits and reports, and was hired by the left-wing press agency Neofot. The rise of National Socialism in 1932 prevented her from working as a photographer and Besnyö decided to leave Berlin. She moved to Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam Besnyö worked for newspapers and press agencies. In the studio she made portraits and photographs of children. Outside of it she made reports and photographed architecture. Despite the outbreak of the Second World War, she was able to continue photographing until 1942. She was forced to go into hiding, but was given a false identity card that did not mention her Jewish background.