"Becoming CoBrA" is the title of the current exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, in which the beginnings of the artists' collective CoBrA are presented and their works before 1949 are shown. In addition to this group, there were many other constellations in which artists of the time joined forces. They moved beyond academic conventions between abstraction and figuration. We present some of these positions in the Schaudepot in Richard-Wagner-Strasse, for example: Eugen Batz (1905-1986), a master student of Paul Klee, was a co-founder of the "Neue Rheinische Sezession" in 1949 and a member of the "Donnerstagsgesellschaft". Hubert Berke (1908-1979) also participated in this discussion group, and in 1951 he also became a member of the artist group ZEN 49. Conrad Westpfahl (1891-1976) participated in the so-called Darmstadt Talks of the early 1950s, which addressed, among other things, the image of man in the art of abstraction. Many works from our show room can be assigned to this generation and are now coming out of the drawers onto the wall: Eugen Batz, Hubert Berke, Hans Christoph, Albert Flocon, Hermann Glöckner, K.O. Götz, Herbert Kunze, Jean Leppien, Conrad Westpfahl. Individual contemporary positions complete the selection: Max Ackermann, Klaus Dennhardt, Herta Günther, Tanja Pohl, Max Uhlig, Albert Wigand.