14 March – 15 June 2008
The Cobra movement is often associated with expressive and colourful canvases, painted by artists such as Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Egill Jacobsen and Carl-Henning Pedersen. However, Cobra was many other things besides visual art, as the movement's many-sided activities demonstrate. The Cobra artists were interested in a broad spectrum of knowledge, including philosophy, music, poetry, psychology, anthropology and ethnography. Their approach to the creation of works was experimental. They would often try out new ways of working together as well as new techniques and methods, and they explored crossovers between different media, for example between visual art and poetry.
The exhibition Drawn Poems, Painted Words and Logograms is based on the intermedial experiments conducted by the Cobra artists and shows examples of different hybrid art forms in which words and images appear in the same work on an equal footing. The works are divided into categories of drawn poems, painted words and logograms. They represent a handful of artists, most of whom were associated with Cobra.
Since the traditional distinctions between the arts have been disregarded, the exhibited works can only with difficulty be described as either images or books, as they exist in an in-between experimental zone.
The works on display are on loan from Kaj Tølbøll Lauritsen, Grete Balle, Lars Olesen, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Esbjerg Museum of Art.