Vandenhove

Karen Kurczynski: War, Memory, and Renewal in the Art of Cobra

Thursday 12 December 2019 at 19.00
VANDENHOVE Centre for Architecture and Art
Rozier 1, 9000 Gent.

Entrance to the lecture is free. Please confirm your attendance via

Serge Vandercam, Nieuport, 1948
Serge Vandercam, Nieuport, 1948

Cobra arose out of the material conditions of deprivation and the hopes for recovery that characterized the immediate postwar period in Europe. This talk will emphasize the early Belgian exhibitions that embody the experimental spirit of the movement. The experiences of the war but also the importance of renewal are alluded to symbolically in the animalistic paintings of Asger Jorn and Constant, the carved slate works of Raoul Ubac, the prints of Pierre Alechinsky, and the blunt materiality of Serge Vandercam's photographs. These works produce vivid social commentaries, building on Surrealist precedents and the colorful spontaneous abstraction of the Danish pre-Cobra Linien group. After the tragedies of the war, Cobra art works look creatively toward the future by reimagining the cyclical returns of the past. The expressive transformation of popular imagery and use of humble materials helped them to reframe the fundamentals of human experience. Their experiments provoke us to recognize the ordinary fallibility and desire for community that characterize what Jorn called the "human animal."

Bio:

Karen Kurczynski is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. She is the author of The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up (Routledge, 2014), and curator of the exhibitions Human Animals: The Art of Cobra (NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 2016) and Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival (co-curated with Karen Friis Herbsleb, Museum Jorn, 2014). Her second book, Reanimating Art: The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe, is forthcoming from Routledge. Karen Kurczynski is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. She is the author of The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up (Routledge, 2014), and curator of the exhibitions Human Animals: The Art of Cobra (NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 2016) and Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival (co-curated with Karen Friis Herbsleb, Museum Jorn, 2014). Her second book, Reanimating Art: The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe, is forthcoming from Routledge.

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