Literature: Troels Andersen: “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba”, Copenhagen 1979, cat. 24, ill. p. 42. Literature: “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba - Skulpturer / Sculptures”, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Holstebro Kunstmuseum & Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum 2003, cat. 25, ill. p. 118.

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba joins a far too long list of female artists who, during their lifetime, never obtained the recognition that they deserved based on their significance in art history alone.

This has since been remedied. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba is today represented at several museums in Denmark and abroad, and her powerful, potent works are often in great demand on the auction market. With the current exhibition at The National Gallery of Denmark, which is organized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, this uncompromising artist is once again pulled a further step into the limelight.

Sonja Ferlov's sympathetic view on art – or “the expression”, as she preferred to call it – was based on a clear desire to shed light on the relationship and community between people rather than to further her career or for economic reasons. The global approach and spirituality are therefore essential clues in the work of Ferlov Mancoba. Her sculptures grow out of a deep interest in non-Western cultures – in particular the African art she became acquainted with in the 1920s through the Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier. The interest was further nurtured in her meeting with her future husband, South African artist Ernest Mancoba. The couple met in Paris at the end of the 1930s, and apart from a brief stay in Denmark from 1947–52, where they never felt quite artistically or socially at home, it was in France that they spent the rest of their lives together.

Five sculptures exist from her time in Denmark, one of which we present at this auction. According to Troels Andersen, the sculpture was a further development of the “proto-shape” that Ferlov worked on during the war years from 1940 to 1946. “It is probably the piece that has taught me the most about working with sculptures and is the mother of everything that has come after,” Ferlov writes in a letter to Troels Andersen in September 1961. (Troels Andersen: “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba”, Borgen, 1979, p. 35)

In a similar way, we are here dealing with a figure whose contours rise from the ground in majestic fashion towards a sudden culmination – and subsequent dramatic fall and end. However, with this figure from 1951, Ferlow works with the relationship, or tensions, between the open and closed form, where the underlying space is embraced and protected by a skeletal-like structure. In the typical style of Ferlov, the surface is marked with a granulated surface that leaves a trace of the creator’s hand as an expression of a close dialogue between the artist and the material.

In the following quote, Ferlov describes this very fact – that the artist is merely a mediator for the release of the inherent power of the piece: "A human is driven by inner forces to express itself in a material ... As long as the thing is alive to me, speaks to me, I can and must continue it.”

(”Kunstneren er et middel for folket” (The Artist Is a Means for the People), interview with Sonja Ferlov in the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten, 1973. Quote from “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba Skulpturer/Sculptures”, Funen Art Museum, Holstebro Kunstmuseum & KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg 2003, p. 25).