Literature: “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba” Skulpturer/Sculptures", Fyns Kunstmuseum, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, 2003, cat. 60, reproduced p. 133. Exhibited: Galerie Mikael Andersen at 1–54, Marrakech, Morocco, 2019.

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba joins the ranks of artists who in their lifetime never achieve the recognition that their purely arthistorical significance deserves. This has since been corrected. Today she is represented in several museums at home and abroad, and her powerful, potent works are often in high demand at auction. With an exhibition at the Statens Museum for Kunst, then the Center Pompidou in Paris, in 2019 and Hanne Vibeke Holsts' engrossing and critically acclaimed book, this very special and uncompromising artist has now once again been drawn a step into the light.

Ferlov Mancoba begins her art studies at the Arts and Crafts School under Bizzie Høyer, and then continues at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, where she meets fellow arts students Richard Mortensen and Ejler Bille. Together they explore the possibilities of surrealism and psychoanalysis in the artistic process.and - as a contributor and co-founder of Linien - she is part of the surrealist inner circle. In the autumn of 1936, she travels to Paris, where she is active in the artistic community. Ferlov Mancoba is enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris until 1942, and acquires a studio in the rue du Moulin-Vert in Montparnasse, where she becomes a neighbor and friend of the artist Alberto Giacometti. ​ The global outlook and spirituality are essential clues in Ferlov Mancoba's work. Her sculptures grows out of a deep interest in non-Western cultures - in particular African art, which she becomes acquainted with already in the 1920s through the Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier. The interest is further nurtured by the meeting with her future husband, the South African artist Ernest Mancoba. They meet in Paris in the late 1930s, and except for a short stay in Denmark from 1947–52, where they never felt completely artistically or personally welcome, it is in France they spent the rest of their lives together.

Sonja Ferlov's sympathetic understanding of art – or “expression”, as she described it – is based on a clear desire to highlight the connection and community between people rather than for career-wise or economic considerations. Ferlov Mancoba's works often depict masks or figures, either alone or in groups of deeply intertwined shapes. They are not human, but sculptural elements bordering on the humane, as this three legged and one-eyed persona frrom 1964.