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DICTIONARY

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CoBrA
International artist collective from 1948 to 1951 in which poets and artists from Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium collaborated. The group's founders included Asger Jorn, the Dutch painter Constant, the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont and the painters Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Corneille and Carl-Henning Pedersen. Later on the group was expanded substantially.

The group is distinguished by an abstract expressive style with inspiration from children's drawings, Nordic mythology, etc. The collective desired experimental renewal of the prevalent artistic idiom and many of them built on the existing Surrealism. Like the Surrealists the CoBrA artists sought to express the subconscious but unlike the former group they felt an abstract idiom better served that purpose.

Additionally CoBrA had a distinctive political and social dimension based on a criticism of the Cold War society of their day.

Asger Jorn, Tal R

Concept Art
Concept Art or Conceptual Art, an art of ideas, emerged in the early 1960s in Europe and more so in USA. The crux of the movement is that the concept of the work of art takes precedence to the material execution. This meant that the physical work of art was de-emphasised in favour of the ideas and thoughts behind the work. The ensuing works were often executed as documentation in the form of pictures, text, diagrams, video or photographs. Title and work frequently convey thoughts on the relationship between word and image on a general level.

Peter Bonde, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Holst Henckel, Sarah Lucas, Vibeke Tandberg, Troels Wörsel, Christian Boltanski, Dan Graham, Jytte Høy, Damien Hirst, John Kørner, Stella Hamberg

Color-field painting
Painting tecnique where large areas are soaked by pure, unmixed colorfields without tonal contrasts. The tecnique was developed in the 1940s and 50s and followed in the wake of abstract expressionism.

Damien Hirst, Anselm Reyle

Cubism
This style emerged from an experimental collaboration between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the years between 1908 and 1914. Cubism is characterised by the application of cubic and geometric shapes. Furthermore it is a rejection of the linear perspective and the construction of pictures that had been prevalent since the Renaissance. Despite the absent linear perspective these pictures are clearly three-dimensional interpretations of the two-dimensional surface of canvas or paper.

The forerunner of the style is Paul Cezanne and his gradual dissolution of shapes and geometric interpretation of the subject. Subsequently the style developed towards the sculptural where the artists incorporated other objects, e.g. newspaper, on the canvas.

Jean Arp