Since the early 1980s, DIE GALERIE has dedicated numerous solo and group exhibitions to the CoBrA group, both in its own showrooms well as in major museums and cultural institutions. In keeping with this tradition, we are now paying an homage to Pierre Alechinsky and his artist friends. To this day, we maintain a particularly close, personal connection with Pierre Alechinsky, the last living artist of the collective, whom this group exhibition celebrates alongside his fellow artists Karel Appel, Corneille, Lucebert, Asger Jorn, Reinhoud, Christian Dotremont, Constant, and others.
Born in Brussels in 1927, Pierre Alechinsky joined the CoBrA group in 1949 as its youngest member. As a young painter, he embraced the CoBrA principles of spontaneity and straightforward expression; after the group disbanded in 1951, Alechinsky developed his own unique style, focusing particularly on drawing and conducting studies on Asian calligraphy. The 97-year-old artist has remained true to the spirit of CoBrA and his unmistakable artistic style to this day.
The CoBrA group saw itself not only as an artistic movement, but also as a platform for political and social action that regarded art as a means of engaging with the world. The artistic and personal bonds between the CoBrA members, along with their shared ideals and beliefs, are reflected in their art and allow us to glimpse into a world bursting with color, energy, and unbridled spontaneity.
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Roberto Matta, born in 1911 in Chile, is one of the most important and idiosyncratic artists of the 20th century. After completing his architectural studies in his homeland, Matta came to Paris in 1933, where he worked in the studio of Le Corbusier and quickly established contacts within the Surrealist circle. In 1938, he participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism and, like many of his fellow painters, went into exile in New York in 1939.
Like André Masson and Max Ernst, he exerted significant influence on the evolving American Abstract Expressionism. In his paintings of the 1940s, Matta created interior landscapes – "inscapes" – featuring apocalyptic and cosmological panoramas of crystalline transparency. The work method that he developed at the time involved merging the Surrealist automatic structures and the color progressions of the background with a thus inspired and resultant apparitional, non-concrete scenery.
After World War Two ended and he returned from exile, settling first in Rome and then Tarquinia, Matta's pictorial panoramas increasingly featured anthropomorphic machine organisms populating a technoid environmental sphere. Matta's artistic exploration of the rapid advances in science and his open political and philosophical positions led to increasingly complex, large-format, and epically expansive compositions. Matta died in 2002 in Italy.