Masquerade

Amstelveen's Cobra Museum of Modern Art presents a fascinating multi-faceted summer exhibition from 12 June to 12 October.

Magical masks

Masquerade features works of of art and Cobra objects dating from 1930 through the late 1950s. The exhibition focuses on the mask as a theme: paintings, works on paper, sculptures and - uniquely - two experimental masks created in the early fifties by Eugène Brands.

Primitive art

Since the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, western artists have looked to 'primitive', non-western art and ethnographic objects for inspiration. Picasso first became acquainted with so-called primitive art in early 1900, an encounter that resulted in his revolutionary Les demoiselles d?Avignon, painted in 1907.

Mack language

For Picasso and his contemporaries, the mask was a means to anatomise and deconstruct reality, with the primitive as a confirmation of the modern. The mask was also important to Cobra. Egill Jacobsen, the Danish Cobra artist, was one of the first to translate the expressive power of the mask in a new 'mask language'. In the Dutch contingent of Cobra, the focus on the mask is predominantly found in the work of Corneille, Eugène Brands and Anton Rooskens.