Erik Nyholm, Cobra Painting, Mixed Media & Oil, 1965

Large and impressive mixed media painting by important Danish artist Erik Nyholm (1911-1990). The painting is made out of thick layers of paint and smaller objects, like iron screws and bolts, that are fixed with glue. The painting is framed in the original pine frame. The style can best be described as a kind of abstract expressionism with references to the "Cobra" group which Nyholm was associates with through his friendship with the Danish artist Asger Jorn and other members of the group. The painting is signed and dated on the backside. Nyholm began in 1942-43 as a painter and executed his first ceramic works a decade later. He was decisively inspired by the personal contact with Asger Jorn and several of the key figures in the Cobra group (Appel, Corneille and Constant), with whom he improvised a decoration in his house in 1948. But it was not until the 1960s that he really began to translate his impressions into a spontaneous, physical painting, which again became the starting point for his actual form of expression, ceramics. Constantly experimenting with the glazes, he produced a series of ceramic works that united the free painterly expression with the classical ceramic forms, the dish and the jar. Often, the dishes are crossed by a stream of molten glass, surrounded by earth and gravel-like structures that recall the course of the stream through the landscape outside his workshop in Funder near Silkeborg. In recent years, he worked with very large structures of a sculptural nature, made at the workshop in Tommerup, which was established by one of his former students, Esben Lyngså Madsen. Asger Jorn saw N.'s work as a continuation of the tradition of potter-based artist ceramics, which began with, among other things, Thorvald Bindesbøll, and continued in his own experiments in 1952-53, some of which were carried out in N.'s oven.