Lucebert

Germany

Frankfurt

DIE GALERIE

Drawing

Rivello

Painting

Omarming

Pijn

Carnaval

Untitled, 7. oct. 61

De opgraving

Actrices

Danseuse

Untitled (mrt. '71)

Evenbeeld

Mixed Media

Ohne Titel ('84.X)

Ohne Titel, 86.VIII.9

Untitled, 87.XI.23

Huistiran

Gott mit uns

The red boy

Geschwister

De laatste goeroe

Mynheer En Mevrouw

Untitled,  23.IV.`70 (A)

Alongside Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Corneille and Pierre Alechinsky, Dutch artist Lucebert (1924-1994) ranks among the most significant representatives of the international post-war group of artists CoBrA. He first worked as a draughtsman and then experienced great success as a poet by contributing with some of his verses to the famous first CoBrA exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1949, which he illustrated in his characteristic comic-like style. It was the hope for a new zeitgeist, the drive for freedom, that brought this generation of young artists together shortly after the Second World War. 

Just like his CoBrA friends, Lucebert also found inspiration for his multi-figured, evocative imagery in Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Max Ernst or Yves Tanguy, along with his personal experiences and traumas of the Second World War. His great and powerful painterly talent, however, was not discovered until the end of the 1950s.

Lucebert's pictorial worlds, which appear to collapse on the painter himself as well as on the viewer, are ironic and humorous, imaginative and sinister, frightening and terrifying, grotesque - an unleashed pandemonium of mummery and danse macabre. The captivating, charged gestures of Lucebert's half-animal-half-human figures disclose the deepest abysses of human interactions, their facial expressions often resembling more of a scream than a conversation. Yet as cruel and absurd as Lucebert's scenery may seem, its core remains profoundly humane, ironic, full of irony and imagination. 

Even in the deepest sense of shock, these human-animal beings keep facing each other in their gestures and postures, and not seldom a small nucleus of luminous, harmonious colour seems to dissolve the menace.

Lucebert - Rebels, Gnomes, Demons | Artland Preview