The exhibition dedicated to Ernest Mancoba is unprecedented, opening up considerable thought on a figure at the heart of debates on racial marginality and erasure, in a reciprocal redefinition of modernities (establishing an African modernity, integrating Africa into European modernities, etc.) It is a way for the Centre Pompidou to present a major career that has remained absent from previous accounts on these issues in France (“Magiciens de la terre,” “Africa Remix”), as well as to boldly affirm its desire to organise non-western artistic retrospectives and retrace the historical depth of certain geographic areas.

Ernest Mancoba (1904 – 2002) was a French-South-African artist, writer and thinker whose life spanned the whole of the 20th century. A painter, sculptor and draftsman, he was a fascinating figure in a class of his own. This is shown in the scope of his historic, transnational career in societies that were repressive or still averse to the idea of a black man with an independent career. His visual language, associated with the CoBrA movement but ever suspended in unresolved tension between figuration and abstraction, is also a specificity of his work. The exhibition proposes, for the first time in France, to retrace this career that has been erased by both racism and a life spent in isolation, as well as the complexity of his artistic work that strove to reconcile political and formal worlds, dissolved in a universal hope at the crossroads of Christianity, Marxism and Ubuntu philosophy (a theory of reconciliation championed by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, in particular).

After fleeing the apartheid in South Africa, which prohibited him from pursuing a career as an artist, Ernest Mancoba arrived in France in 1938 where he was soon sent to a German labour camp due to his British citizenship. During World War II he married Sonja Ferlov, a Danish colleague whom he met in one of his decorative art classes. After the war, they went to Denmark together for five years where they joined the early CoBrA movement through their friend Asger Jorn. CoBrA combined all of Mancoba’s deepest interests present in his work since his time in South Africa : the importance of soliciting the subconscious, the necessity of returning to society’s spiritual roots through folklore, faith in society’s materialistic transformation and the goal of making art universal and not just Pan-Nordic. Mancoba did not remained long with the group, however ; his carefully constructed and semantic abstraction was disputed, and underlying racism relegated him to the status of an invisible man or “black dot” of the movement.

Returning to France, Mancoba and Ferlov opted for a life of solitude, a choice which proved definitive, and moved to Oigny-en-Valois. They accompanied their artistic practice with political and ethical activism which they hoped to share with their artistic entourage, without ever succeeding. In the early the 1960s the couple found a home near Montparnasse where they spent the rest of their lives. A store on the street served as their studio, which was divided in two using a sheet and where their artistic practices complemented one another and developed mutually.

The 1970s saw the only exhibitions dedicated to Mancoba during his lifetime in the West : in Denmark in 1969, at the Aarhus Kunstmuseum and the Holstebro Kunstmuseum and, in 1977, at the Københavns Kunstforening in Copenhagen, the Fyns Stifts Kunstmuseum in Odense and the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. After the death of Ferlov (December 17, 1984), the 1980s represented a period of mourning and the gradual emergence of a universal language that attempted to translate what the artist called “the unspeakable” : Mancoba’s last formal artistic burst, or more likely, his greatest achievement.

In 1983 Elza Miles, a South-African academic, discovered her compatriot’s work in the “CoBrA” exhibition held that year at the City of Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne and attempted to meet him. In 1994, she published the only monograph written about the artist in his lifetime, Lifeline Out of Africa, the Art of Ernest Mancoba, and organized an exhibition in parallel in Johannesburg just after the end of apartheid. In 1999, Okwui Enwezor included Mancoba in the visionary exhibition The Short Century, Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994. Hans-Ulrich Obrist tracked him down in Paris to conduct an interview that was first published in 2003 in the journal Nka, journal of contemporary African art, and which has since become famous. It was republished many times over, inaugurating a series of major articles on the role of the artist in the accounts of modernity in general.

The exhibition evokes the tension between the intellectual contribution of an artist and writer trained in journalism, and the implementation of a secret and poetic mode of expression in his work based on the synesthesic notion of “connections.” Designed as an initiatory experience, the exhibition begins with a sound threshold from which Mancoba’s voice resonates, leading into an immersive, intimate room dedicated to his successive battles with material and spatial limitations throughout his life in exile.

A system of echoes spreads throughout the exhibition through the work of the artist Kemange Wa Lehulere (born in 1984 in Cape Town), whose work is simultaneously poetic and political and is imbued with his shared quest with Mancoba for a language above language, giving prominence to that which cannot be expressed, such as collective repression.

From an initial matrix dominated by Mancoba’s tireless search for the “central figure”, different thematic- chronological chapters spread out throughout the exhibition, designed as motifs in a unified dance where only one image seems to move. In 1938, when Mancoba arrived in Paris from Cape Town via London, he decided to learn how to dance and bought a manual to practise in his room near Montparnasse.

One evening, a friend took him to the Bal Nègre, where his was clearly ill at ease. To the repeated entreaties of his friend to come and dance, he retorted firmly: “I shall dance in another society”. However, in the book dedicated to the artist by the academic Elza Miles, Mancoba evokes dance as the ultimate level of communication. This rhythmic dance is without a doubt at work in the artist’s practice, where the figure is constantly turning round and round. It is precisely this unresolved tension between historic oppression and humanistic and poetic resistance, between an impossible life and the liberated work of Ernest Mancoba, that will be addressed in this exhibition.

A parallel program of contemporary activities and meetings will be held during the exhibition to further explore an unprecedented collection of archive material and question the complexities of a career at the crossroads of multiple cultures and a variety of formal worlds.

« I want to sum up and put in a nutshell the program of our spiritual responsibility as artists. As artists we have followed the national academies, and each is national, and the point of this is political. Each country follows the method by which each country will survive and these countries have never been united.England, Denmark, France. Each country has its different ways of looking. They agreed that in the Occident they constitute the whole of humanity, each other country, the rest of the world are trying in vain to become like Europe. In my memoirs I am trying to show my struggle to get the rest of the third world included in part of all humanity. The third world has to be taken into consideration as it exists. I want that this separation this apartheid has to be pushed aside and that all human species have to hang together hand in hand that’s all » 

Ernest Mancoba

The research carried out for this exhibition led to revelation of substantial archive material to be categorised and indexed in view of a monographic publication for the fall of 2019.

Ernest Mancoba
From June 26th to September 23th
Centre Pompidou, 75191 Paris

Admission: €14, reduced price €11
Free admission for Centre Pompidou members.
Home printable tickets: centrepompidou.fr
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr

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outh-African artist Ernest Mancoba and Danish artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, exiled in Paris for almost the entire length of their respective careers, will be exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Galerie O and the Galerie d’art graphique from June 26th to September 23rd 2019.

Married in Paris and sharing the same Parisian studio, Ernest Mancoba and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba will be given top billing by the Centre Pompidou in two distinct spaces, in order to pay tribute to the breadth of their practices, inseparable and yet singular.

This is the first full retrospective in France on the work of Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911-1984). Designed in collaboration with the SMK, National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, the exhibition presents 58 sculptures and 67 drawings by this Danish artist still little known in France today. Starting in the 1930s, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba produced a body of sculptural and pictorial work that was both profoundly personal and at the same time connected to 20th-century Danish and international artistic movements. At the crossroads between abstract and figurative forms, her sculptures and drawings were created using a large body of references, from African and Pre-Colombian art to Surrealism. Anthropomorphic, her works unveil a way of seeing the individual as a being that is perpetually evolving, refashioning the body’s borders, both in terms of the material and metaphysical, formal and spiritual.

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba first studied painting in 1931 and joined up with the new generation of Danish artists (Richard Mortenson, Ejler Bille, Hans Øllgaard and Vilhem Bjerke-Petersen). Founders of the Linien group in 1934 and its eponymous publication, they defended, alongside Sonja Ferlov, an emancipated and engaged art that connected abstraction and surrealism, and set down the guidelines for spontaneous abstract creation that later played a major role in the Scandinavian art scene during and after the war. After completing her first paintings, Sonja Ferlov turned towards sculpture, experimenting with clay or using objects found in nature.

In 1936, the artist moved to Paris. Enrolled at the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, she rented a studio near that of Alberto Giacometti, with whom she became friends. Sonja Ferlov met Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Jean Arp and Sophie-Taeuber-Arp while preparing a Surrealist exhibition with her compatriots in Copenhagen.

Between 1937 and 1940 she created a collection of sculptures with organic shapes bordering on abstraction, introduced the theme of the mask in her work and started a series of drawings based on a complicated system of symbols. In 1939, Sonja Ferlov met the South-African artist Ernest Mancoba, whom she married in 1942. At the start of the War she moved to Denmark for a few months before returning to Paris to join Ernest Mancoba, who was not long after incarcerated in the Grande Caserne German prisoner-of-war camp in Saint Denis. During the war, she created Sculpture (1940-1946), a flagship piece that characterised her work method and was both spontaneous and rooted in a process of ongoing metamorphosis. Cast in plaster in 1946, Sculpture was the subject of a limited number of bronze editions, including a copy that was acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 2018.

In 1947, one year after the birth of their son Wonga, the Ferlov-Mancoba couple moved to Denmark. Sonja exhibited with her former Linien comrades, as well as those who defended the spontaneous method, and they together created the international Cobra group in 1948 (Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Carl-Henning Pedersen). Victims of racial intolerance in Denmark, in 1952, the family moved to the village of Oigny-en-Valois, to the northeast of Paris. Sonja Ferlov created little during this time but experimented with yellow clay and as of 1957 produced major sculptures that can be read as a reconfiguration and liberation of the human body.

The family moved definitively to Paris in 1961, where the artist undertook a series of very large sculptures. Her works included a variety of figures which, for some, refer to the sacred, where form blends in a dynamic of circulation and movement into an idea of a plural and composite being.

During the last decades of her life, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba regularly exhibited in her home country and occasionally in France. She enjoyed great success in Denmark and, in 1971, received the Thorvaldsen medal, one of the highest Danish distinctions for the visual arts. During these years, she continued to create works where the theme of duality appears in the form of masks and helmets. Emptiness became a central element in many of her sculptures – from every point of view.

Right up until her death in 1984, she continued to develop a body of work that transformed the individual into a transitory being, inscribed in a spiritual community and embodying the desire to counter a certain kind of western history, so dear to the bourgeoisie of her time.

 

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba at the Centre Pompidou from June 26th to September 23rd 2019.
Centre Pompidou, 75191 Paris cedex 04
+ 33 1 44 78 12 33
Access: metro Hôtel de Ville and Rambuteau, RER Châtelet-Les-Halles.Opening times: every day from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., except Tuesdays and May 1st.

Admission: €14, reduced price €11
Free admission for Centre Pompidou members.
Home printable tickets: centrepompidou.fr
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr

The post Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s abstract sculptures exhibited at the Pompidou Centre alongside Ernest Mancoba’s works appeared first on Artskop.

Discovery and diversity are the key words of this must-see spring event in Paris, which combines regional exploration of European art from the post-war period to the present day with a cosmopolitan look at emerging world creation..

For its 21st Art Paris edition, with forty-six solo shows (compared to thirty-six in 2018), 150 galleries (compared to 143 in 2018), 44% of new entries, 20 countries represented (including, for the first time, Cameroon, Bulgaria and Peru), the 2019 selection shows a strong move up the range. Favouring a thematic approach and open to all artistic media, Art Paris once again cultivates its difference, that of being an international fair turned towards discovery that focuses on the European stages from the post-war period to the present day while exploring new horizons of international creation whether they come from Asia, Africa, the Middle East or Latin America.

Women artists in the spotlight

Curated by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, the 2019 edition presents a critical and subjective overview of the work of women artists in France.
25 specific projects by women artists will be selected from amongst the exhibits of participating galleries. This selection is divided into four themes: Abstraction, the Feminist Avant-Garde, Image and Theatricality. AWARE has also been invited to write a critical essay that situates each artist’s work in its historical context.

AWARE – Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions aims to produce, index and distribute information about 20^th century women artists – was co-founded in 2014 by art historian Camille Morineau, who specialises in women artists. She is also the director of exhibitions and collections at the Monnaie de Paris.

Among the list of women artists chosen by AWARE, we note the presence of the Franco-Malagasy artist Malala Andrialavidrazana presented by the Caroline Smulders gallery. Originally from Madagascar, Malala Andrialavidrazana (born in 1971) has lived in Paris since the early 1980s. The artist has made a name for himself through his photographs, which explore the links between personal history and cultural identity, intimacy and universality, and highlight the contrast between the perception of the world by the West and the countries of the South. In her series of Figures works, which she began in 2015, the artist explores the possibilities of collage to question the visual heritage of the colonial era and its impact on our perception of the world. By superimposing fragments of images from different periods such as ethnographic engravings, banknotes, record covers, etc., she tackles the subjects of otherness, cultural mixing or the need to question preconceptions from a “Eurocentric” imagination. It thus proposes a form of decolonization through images, all in allusion and poetry.

An exploration of Latin American art with the “Southern Stars” section

In 2019, Art Paris is setting out to explore Latin American artfrom the 1960s to the present day. Around twenty European, Asian and Latin American galleries are presenting an ensemble of 60 Argentinean, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian, Cuban, Mexican, Peruvian and Venezuelan artists. In parallel, other projects such as a video programme, installation artworks, the presentation of works by Latin American women artists from the collection of Catherine Petitgas and conferences at the Maison de l’Amérique latine will highlight the creative effervescence that reigns on the continent.

*Southern Stars: An Exploration of Latin American Art is curated by the independent exhibition curator Valentina Locatelli, who is based in Switzerland.

As part of the celebration of Latin America, Art Paris also hosts a selection of works by South American artists from Catherine Petitgas‘ private collection. Entitled “Amazons”, this exhibition brings together women artists from the countries of the Amazon basin, mainly from Brazil (Beatriz Milhazes, Maria Nepomuceno, Rivane Neueunschwander, Lygia Clark, Anna Bella Geiger), Colombia (Liliana Angulo, Beatriz González, Nohemí Pérez), Peru (Sandra Gamarra, Ximena Garrido-Lecca), Venezuela (Lucia Pizzani and Sol Calero) and whose work focuses both on female identity, particularly among ethnic minorities, and on the tropical aesthetics of these regions rich in biodiversity and whose ecology is threatened.

*Catherine Petitgas is a London-based collector and art historian specialising in modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on Latin America.

We invite you to read our article on the Southern Stars section and Catherine Petitgas' collection here

A historical and current journey through the Latin American scenes

Galleries spread throughout the fair’s different sectors invite visitors on a journey of discovery through Latin America’s different scenes, considering them from both a historical and contemporary point of view.

Galería Freijo is focusing on two historical figures from the Mexican scene, abstract sculptor and co-founder of Stridentism Germán Cueto and Felipe Ehrenberg, a leading light in the field of Mexican conceptual art in the 1970s. Numerous galleries are showcasing the work of the proponents of geometric abstraction from the 60s and 70s, including Carlos Cruz-Diez(Venezuela), Ivan Contreras-Brunet (Chilli), Darío Pérez-Flores (Venezuela) and Marino di Teana (Argentina). Women artists are also in the spotlight with solo shows featuring Leonor Fini, a surrealist painter born in Buenos Aires (Weinstein Gallery/Galerie Minsky); Mexican artist Carmen Mariscal, whose work addresses questions of gender and female stereotypes (Ana Mas Project); and Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, a Chilean artist who is the subject of a mini-retrospective at the Wooson Gallery featuring her drawings that touch on questions of sex and religion.

The Cuban scene is the subject of a group exhibition at the Xin Dong Cheng Gallery, which brings together six artists from different generations: Manuel Mendive, Raúl Martínez, Adonis Flores, René Francisco Rodríguez, Michel Mirabaland Yunier Hernández Figueroa.

Two galleries Nosco and Galerie Younique are showcasing the young Peruvian scene with emblematic figures such as José Carlos Martinat and José Luis Martinat, two brothers who are famous for their installations that question the past and the present of post-colonial societies. La Balsa Arte (Bogota/Medellin) is presenting a dialogue between the works of three figures from the Colombian scene with drawings (Juan Osorno), paintings (Julian Burgos) and installation art (Luis Fernando Peláez), whereas Galería Solo/Eva Albarran & Christian Bourdais has given over part of its space to Carlos Amorales, a major figure on the Mexican scene who works in different media such as video, installation art, photography and paper.

A particularly well represented African art scene 

For this 2019 edition of Art Paris, several galleries also present artists from African art scenes…

Among them: Galerie Dominique Fiat exhibits the works of Nicola Lo Calzo, Hardy Sy, Rachid Koraïchi (Algeria), Safâa Erruas (Morocco), but also several artists from Benin: Emo de Medeiros, Dominique Zinkpé, Cyprien Tokoudagba ; Galerie ARTCO – presents the works of Marcelo Brodsky, Marion Boehm, Justin Dingwall (South Africa) ; Galerie Capazza will exhibit the works of Francis Limérat (Algeria) ; Galerie MAM – Boris Nzebo, Hervé Yamguen (Cameroon), Ngimbi Luve (Congo), Oumar Ball (Mauritania), Ousmane Niang (Senegal) ; Galeria Filomena Soares – Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola); Galerie Chauvy – Soly Cissé (Senegal); So Art Gallery – Morran Benlahcen (Morocco), Kabbaj Houda; Finally Galerie Claire Gastaud exhibits the works of Jean-Charles Eustache (Guadeloupe), and many others…

With such a complete program Art Paris 2019 is definitely the must-see event of spring in Paris !

ARTSKOP3437 official media partner of Art Paris Art Fair 2019

For more information on the 2019 edition of Art Paris, please consult the following links:  : 

→Art Paris Art Fair highlights women artists from Latin America

→ Official website of Art Paris Art Fair

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Self-taught, he has developed his own theory of movement and architecture, today resulting in an artistic form on the crossroads between performance, sculpture and new media. As keen on linguistics as he is on physical theatre (Ecole Jacques Lecoq), he follows logical systems that are non-linear and self-sufficient, and which are often best understood when they are connected with each other. His work is generally based on techniques inspired from religious rites and rituals,ranging from butō to the ballroom, new technologies or hypnosis.  

The artist’s performance is part of the Palais de Tokyo de Paris programme entitled “La Manutention – Performers in residence”.Launched in 2017, la Manutention is a new format that welcomes and encourages exploration and experimentation, providing artists the opportunity to develop their practices and produces original performances at the occasion of four performatives evenings for one month, giving visitors the opportunity to discover the artists’ world and an occasion to follow the evolution of their ongoing work

*The event can be accessed only upon presentation of an entry ticket.

→ Ticket access / Palais de Tokyo

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