Cobra 60

On November 8th 1948, artists Asger Jorn, Christian Dotremont, Joseph Noiret, Karel Appel, Constant and Corneille met in a café in Paris. They founded a group of artists and gave it the name CoBrA after the names of the capital cities of their homelands Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands (Copenhague, Bruxelles, Amsterdam). These artists had a great desire to create something new and shake up conventional ways of thinking, which they found both in art and in life more generally. They set out to start a revolution, and remained in the history of art as one of the last avant-garde movements.

The Cobra group functioned for only three years. A lot happened during that time: the group published their own Cobra magazine and organised exhibitions, the most important of which were held in Amsterdam and in Liège. The artists gathered together to make art and talked about a new ideal society, where art and life would become one. The three years of the Cobra group were intensive, but for several reasons the members mutually decided to bring its story to an end after their last exhibition in November 1951.

Today the artists who were part of the group are world famous. The Cobra 60 jubilee exhibition shows works from 14 of these artists. The majority of the exhibition works are from 1948-1951, the official operating years of the group. There are not many works from that period in Finland. Many of the exhibition works are from private collections in the Netherlands, and are on display in Finland for the first time. The later stages of the Cobra artists can be examined in the works made after the Cobra period. The most recent works are from the 21st century.