Despite being confined to obscurity in life and after her death, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984) has emerged as one of the foremost sculptors of her age, a key figure within Danish modernism and an active member of the CoBrA circle.
Ferlov Mancoba trained as a painter, receiving lessons from artist Bizzie Høyer then training more formally at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts between 1933 and 1935. After graduating, Ferlov Mancoba, while on holiday on Bornholm, collected some driftwood and assembled forms. This became her first sculpture, Living Branches, now at Museum Jorn. Sculpture soon became her primary medium. That same year, she debuted at the annual Artists’ Autumn Exhibition (Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling) with two plaster sculptures, Bird with Young and Two Living Beings.
From the mid-1930s she was involved with the artists’ group and art journal Linien (The Line, 1934–39), which was the first conduit of French Surrealism to Denmark. During this time she was influenced by and an influence on the “abstract-Surrealist” artists and Linien co-founders Ejler Bille, Vilhelm Bjarke-Petersen and Richard Mortensen. Her early sculptural assemblages of branches and organic materials were influenced by the Dada sculptures of Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters.
In 1937 she settled in Paris, attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Here, she met and socialised with Surrealist artists Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti, whose studio was in the same building as hers. She also met the South African artist Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002), whom she married in 1942.
As a child, Ferlov Mancoba was introduced to African art at the home of Danish collector Carl Kjersmeier. When she moved to Paris in 1937, she sought out African art at the newly reopened Musée de l´Homme, where she also encountered art objects from other parts of the world, including pre-Columbian cultures. For Ferlov Mancoba, these objects embodied an idea of artmaking as both collective and spiritual.
After a brief return to Copenhagen at the beginning of the war, she spent the remainder of the war 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 with the artists’ groups Linien II and Høst. From 1952 she was based in France. In 1969 she became a member of Den Frie Udstilling.
Ferlov Mancoba is represented in prominent collections, including Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet, Statens Museum for Kunst, Kunsten – Museum of Modern Art Aalborg and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. A groundbreaking 2019 exhibition at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen titled Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Mask and Face brought Ferlov Mancoba firmly into the pantheon of Danish art history. The exhibition travelled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In a few short years, Ferlov Mancoba came to global attention.