3 facts about Sonja Ferlov Mancoba

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1 November 1911 – 17 December 1984) was a Danish open-minded sculptor.

She attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was affiliated subsequently the CoBrA group, along later than her husband, South African artiste Ernest Mancoba.

Ferlov Mancoba was trained as a painter. She studied below Bizzie Høyer from 1930 to 1932 and at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1933 to 1935. She debuted at the annual Artists’ Autumn Salon (Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling) in 1935 considering two plaster sculptures, Bird once Young and Two Living Beings. From the mid-1930s she was operating with the artists’ group and art journal Linien (The Line, 1934–39), which was the first conduit of French Surrealism to Denmark. During this get older she was influenced by and an influence on the “abstract-Surrealist” artists and Linien co-founders Ejler Bille, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, and Richard Mortensen. Her to the front sculptural assemblages of branches and organic materials (Objet trouvés) were influenced by the Dada sculptures of Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. In 1936 she exhibited, among extra works, the sculpture The Owl (destroyed).

In 1937 she contracted in Paris, where she met and socialized in the same way as the Surrealist artists Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti, whose studio was in the thesame building as hers. It was at this period that she met Ernest Mancoba, whom she married in 1942; their son Wonga (1946–2015) would eventually next become a acclaimed artist. In Denmark Ferlov Mancoba was already eager in non-Western art; in Paris she developed her knowledge of ethnographic objects at the newly reopened Musée de l’Homme. After a brief reward to Copenhagen at the dawn of the war, she spent the remainder of the warfare in France, where Ernest Mancoba was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

From 1947 through 1951 Ferlov Mancoba was in Denmark, where she exhibited as a guest behind the artists’ groups Linien II (The Line II, 1949-?) and Høst (Harvest, 1948). From 1952 she was based in France. In 1969 she became a devotee of Den Frie Udstilling (The Free Exhibition, est. 1891).

Ferlov Mancoba’s biomorphic sculptures either use or evoke organic materials and forms. Around 1948 she moreover briefly made geometric abstract sculptural work.

She acknowledged the Tagea Brandts travel inherit in 1971, a Statens Kunstfond (National Art Fund) award in 1964, the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1971, and the Niels Larsen-Stevns Medal in 1977.

Ferlov Mancoba is represented in the similar to collections: Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Den Kongelige kobberstiksamling, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Brandts Museum of Photographic Art, Moderna Museet, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Statens Museum for Kunst, Kunsten – Museum of campaigner Art Aalborg.