Ernest Mancoba was born in 1904 near Boksburg. He left South Africa for Paris in 1938, where he met and married the Danish artist Sonja Ferlov. In 1947 he moved with his family to Denmark. In Europe he exhibited with the progressive COBRA movement, a European avant-garde movement that stood for spontaneous and involuntary expression during the years of its existence. These paintings are presumably from 1948-1951 and are most significant in showing an early exploratory phase in his imaginative development as a black artist working self consciously in a modernist abstract idiom. This is a unique and very valuable collection. SMAC is proud to be able to present these paintings this year. Ernest Mancoba died in 2002.