Current exhibitions

After the Second World War, the international avant-garde movement CoBrA unleashed a true revolution in the art world. This group of visual artists and poets from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark made a radical break with academic conventions, advocating instead for an artistic climate characterized by freedom, spontaneity, and accessibility. Today, we recognize their experimental approach as the quintessential CoBrA style: spontaneous lines, expressive colors, and seemingly childlike figures.

A key aspect of the CoBrA movement was the experimental collaboration between visual artists and the poets known as De Vijftigers (The Fifties Generation). These encounters gave rise to remarkable peintures-mots (word-paintings) and rare collaborative portfolios and booklets, in which text and image merge into a single visual language. Graphic techniques—lithography in particular—played an intriguing role in this process; the lithographic stone provided an ideal surface for these free and spontaneous collaborations. The freedom and immediacy of printmaking fostered works filled with pure, uninhibited expression by key figures such as Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, and Asger Jorn.

The exhibition CoBrA: The Written Image reveals a new side of CoBrA—one previously unfamiliar to the general public. With its unique focus on collaborations and printmaking, the exhibition presents—for the first time—extraordinary works from institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; pieces that had long remained unseen within their collections. Discover how word and image come together masterfully on the lithographic stone.