Cobra: 1000 Days of Free Art

A collection of masterpieces from one of Europe’s most powerful modern art movements has come to the UAE for the first time and is now on display at Sharjah Art Museum.
The Cobra: 1000 Days of Free Art exhibition, which started yesterday, features more than 60 artworks from the famous post-war Cobra movement from the collection of the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, including paintings, photographs, ceramics, textiles, jazz music and documentary materials from the period between 1947 and the early 1960s.
Established in Paris in 1948 by a group of avant-garde artists and poets, the revolutionary Cobra movement set out to change the face of art through new forms of experimental and spontaneous expression. The exhibition tells the story of Cobra through a chronological timeline, introducing the visitor to the social and historical developments of the period 1930-1960 in Europe. Historical images and documentaries set the scene of a continent ravaged by war, while spoken word portraits by Cobra artists reflect on the birth and significance of the movement.
CoBrA is an acronym for the three capital cities where the founding artists lived and worked: Copenhagen (Denmark), Brussels (Belgium) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands). They strove to create a new, free and expressive art, and to liberate the artistic creativity that is hidden in every human being. The movement lasted until 1951 and brought together visual artists, poets, writers and thinkers whose richly imaginative and often childlike styles earned Cobra a place in the records of 20th Century art history.