Egill Jacobsen : 1910 - 1998

  Ophobning - Accumulation : 1937


Painted in 1937 now exchibited at ' Statens Museum for Kunst' Copenhagen.
A dark picture painted as an expression of the dark times in Europe in the years before the 2. World War. This painting is often referred to as the first COBRA painting.
Egill Jacobsen’s mask pictures were first exhibited in Copenhagen at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition in 1936 and the Linien exhibition in 1937. They were immediately perceived by his colleagues as the new creations they were, and in the course of a few months we can see them taking the mask motive up in their own pictures. In Jacobsen’s paintings the masks are developed in the direction of the theatrical, the presentation and the game, and this continues in a long series of pictures throughout his work. The theatrical aspect is realized by the pictorial space becoming a kind of stage set, where the figures are seen frontally, often on one plane, and dancing, carrying out secret games and rituals of exorcism. The mask, the picture, is the meeting-place between the artist and the spectator. The mask figures look into the painter’s mind, formulating his most secret and most private experiences, his reactions to himself and his surroundings. At the same time, the mask in itself is a universal language, where the spectator can decipher the artist’s experience and find his own.
 
 




About other Cobra artists
Piere Alechinsky
Else Alfelt
Karel Appel
Mogens Balle
Ejler Bille
 Corneille
Christian Dotremont
Sonja Ferlov
Stephen Gilbert
Svavar Gudnason
Henry Heerup
C. O. Hultén
Egill Jacobsen
Asger Jorn
Erik Ortvad
Carl-Henning Petersen
Max Walter Svanberg
Anders Österlin

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