Sonja Ferlov Mancoba Exhibition at National Gallery of Denmark

The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen is hosting 'No one creates alone,' a solo exhibition of Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984), running until May 5, 2019. Mancoba, alongside Egill Jacobsen, Ejler Bille, and Asger Jorn, was a key figure in Nordic sculptural modernism. She discovered her creative vocation in her twenties and joined the Danish avant-garde group Linien. After moving to Paris in 1936, she was influenced by Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, and Jean Arp, yet maintained a distinctive style. Her work employs classic materials like plaster, wood, and bronze, emphasizing angularity to express modernist experimentation, rejection of consumer society, and the horrors of World War II. Masks are a recurring motif, inspired by pre-Columbian Mexican culture and Northern European design, functioning both as cult objects and everyday items. They evoke brutality, mortality, and critique of 20th-century materialism, linking to intellectual discourses on masks by Luigi Pirandello, Antonin Artaud, and Blaise Cendrars. Mancoba's art aims for a universal phase of world art, bridging cultures and epochs, exorcising war violence, preserving traditions, and recovering spiritual roots threatened by mass society between the 1930s and 1960s. Her lesser-known graphic work features surrealist color combinations and recurring symbols like eggs and birds, representing fertility and human creativity oppressed by violence and alienation.