Sonja Ferlov Mancoba – An Uncompromising Fighter
Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–84) is one of the few female CoBrA artists. In the years preceding World War II, she came across surrealism and travelled to Paris, where she rented a studio next to artist Alberto Giacometti, who became her lifelong friend and inspiration. Here, she became an important link between European avant-garde art and the Danish art scene.
”Art is like a stick we hold in our hand. Both to help us stand upright, walk and defend ourselves.”
Sonja Ferlov Mancoba
Throughout her life, Mancoba sought to create art that would forge new connections between people based on spiritual values in the materialistic, selfish world she felt she lived in. It was probably the spirit of community and the free idiom that led Mancoba to the circle around CoBrA. She once said, “Only by virtue of each other can we live and breathe, and no one creates alone”, which is fully in line with the CoBrA way of thinking. In 1942, she married CoBrA’s South African member, Ernest Mancoba.
Uncompromising, disciplinary and profound are epithets that are easy to assign to Mancoba. She was intensely self-critical when it came to her work, and the downside of this – from a contemporary perspective – was that she discarded a great many of her works. One of her main works, for example, ended up at the bottom of Birkerød Lake because she couldn’t get the sculpture to “behave”. Mancoba rarely exhibited and did not get involved with the commercial art market. This meant that, like many of her CoBrA peers, she lived in poverty, and her art remained largely unknown until recent years, despite the otherwise marked imprint she left on abstract sculptural art – and not least on CoBrA.