The Bucerius Forum in Hamburg shows surrealistic sculptors

It is reminiscent of three sculptors of surrealism: the Danish Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984), Brazilian Maria Martins (1894–1973) and the Swiss Isabelle Waldberg (1911–1990). With very different techniques and courage to size, difficult material and sexual openness, between 1930 and 1960 they shaped surrealism with vegetative -winding, anthropomorphic.

As part of the artistic avant -garde in Paris and New York, the sculptors, which are largely forgotten today, further developed the surrealistic visual language of the dreamlike, imaginary. While their colleagues with portrait busts or small animal sculptures sought modest acceptance in this discipline particularly difficult for women, Mancoba, Martins and Waldberg have created monumental work far from any courtesy.

Waldberg confidently countered the expectations of the audience in 1962: “At first I don’t know what is beautiful. Is it something pleasant, something round, something polished, something that shines? Nice, but for whom? We are not here to please others. “

Like many artists in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, all three were very interested in non -European art. For Sonja Ferlov, who later married the black South African painter Ernest Mancoba and experienced racism in Paris, this has been particularly true in Copenhagen since her youth.

The sculptor connected to the artist group Cobra created half-abstract beings, warrior figures and masks made of sound, plaster and bronze. Mancoba lived very withdrawn.

The diplomatic wife Maria Martens, on the other hand, appeared extravagant and worldly. Instead of studying at the art academy, she took private lessons in 1938 in Paris at the Ukrainian wax portraitist Catherine Barjansky.

In her husband’s Washington embassy, ​​she set up a studio and a fuel furnace for her life-sized terracotta figures. She confidently signed her goddesses, monster and amazon myths with her first name “Maria”.

The South American is the star of the Hamburg show. Marcel Duchamp also reacted impressively to her appearance and, according to her body dimensions, formed a double -sex being with spread legs in his work “Étant Donnés”. Martins was subsequently reciprocating with her iconic sculpture of an impossible hug as proof of the insurmountable duality of the sexes.

Isabelle Waldberg was also friendly. The work of the intellectual artist who taught on the Parisian École des Beaux Arts ranges from filigree wood and metal structures to abstract bronze work to collages. During the Second World War, the Swiss with Maria Martins belonged to the New York art scene around Peggy Guggenheim and the immigrants Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Piet Mondrian.

The title of the exhibition “In Her Hands” alludes to the artistic work process of the three sculptors and their self -empowerment in the then surrealistic men’s world. There are around 100 sculptures and sculptures as well as collages and drawings, mostly from private collections or their discounts. They were never shown together before.

The exhibition architecture corresponds to the concept with which the three artists once presented their work themselves – in rooms with daylight, without partitions. The openness and the economical wall texts benefit the dialogue of the sculptures, but also to perceive the powerful individuality of the sculptors.

Mancoba, Martins and Waldberg developed a surrealistic force and became impulse providers, without muse, groupie or wife to have been one of the dominant male geniuses of the surrealists.