LEEDS.- Marking the centenary of Surrealism, The Traumatic Surreal will be the first exhibition to explore the radical appropriation and development of surrealist sculptural traditions by post-war women artists from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. It features works by:

• Renate Bertlmann (b.1943, Vienna, Austria)

• Birgit Jürgenssen (b.1944, Vienna, Austria d.2003, Vienna, Austria)

• Bady Minck (b.1962, Ettelbruck, Luxembourg)

• Meret Oppenheim (b.1913 Berlin, Germany; d.1985, Basel, Switzerland)

• Pipilotti Rist (b.1962, Grabs, Switzerland)

• Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm) (b.1921, Brandenburg, Germany; d.1999, Cologne, Germany)

• Eva Wipf (b.1929, Santo Angelo do Paraiso, Brazil; d.1978, Brugg, Switzerland)


Dive into the captivating works of women artists who reshaped Surrealism.



“A century after the Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924, the movement’s impact in German-speaking countries has not been fully explored. We’re delighted to collaborate with Professor Patricia Allmer to bring these artists together for the first time.

“In a period when women’s rights are under threat across the world, and politics in many places is lurching to the right, exploring these powerful critiques of fascism and patriarchy is particularly timely.” -- Dr Clare O’Dowd, Henry Moore Institute Research Curator and co-curator of the exhibition

In these specific national contexts, the radical appropriation and development of surrealist sculptural traditions becomes a powerful critical tool for women to confront the historical trauma suffered under the long shadow of fascism. Using unconventional materials, creating layers of meaning that evoke the repressed and the unconscious and embracing the capacity to shock or challenge, these artists show the continuing relevance of Surrealism’s disruptive legacies.

The Traumatic Surreal is co-curated with Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh, and is based on her book of the same name. Bringing together works from the 1960s through to the present day, the exhibition includes a number of sculptures, such as those by Eva Wipf and Ursula, which have never been shown in the UK.

The exhibition showcases how women artists across several generations turned to sculpture to address and critique post-war legacies of war, patriarchy and fascism. Using surrealist devices such as found objects, collage, and assemblage, they took up Surrealism’s challenge to conventions and systems of belief to address the residues of historical trauma. These artists continue surrealist traditions while taking the movement in completely new directions and dramatically expanding the sculptural field.

Surrealist techniques enable the artists to respond to the legacies of historical trauma in complex and sometimes disturbing ways. A recurrent concern with the boundaries between human and animal can be seen in the use of fur, feathers and hair. The disturbing bodily and sexual connotations of these materials suggest something monstrous, a legacy both of the fascist tendency to fetishise the characteristics of animals (such as Hitler’s obsession with wolves) and the social and cultural conditions of post-war female experience in German-speaking countries.

From the furry tongue which extends uncomfortably from the protagonist’s mouth in Bady Minck’s film La Belle est la Bête 2005, to Renate Bertlmann’s unsettling use of fur in Fur Heart with Knife 1987, the works in the exhibition disrupt conventional ideas about women’s bodies and question the position of women in relation to male cultural fantasies.

“It is important to explore the enduring legacies of fascism and its ongoing influence on the social and political experiences of women.

“This exhibition demonstrates the fascinating ways these radical artists use surrealist sculptural practices and traditions to critique post-war patriarchy’s treatment of women and address their traumatic experiences.” -- Patricia Allmer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh and co-curator

Cages and other forms of physical constraint, metaphors of psychological and political restriction, appear throughout the exhibition. Birgit Jürgenssen’s Caught Happiness 1982 presents an uncomfortably confined, indeterminate form bound and pinned within a metal cage. Pipilotti Rist’s film Open My Glade 2000 depicts the artist’s heavily made-up face becoming grotesquely deformed through being pressed against a glass surface, an image of how invisible constraints restrict and disfigure women’s experiences. In Meret Oppenheim’s little-known 1970 work Word Wrapped in Poisonous Letters (Becomes Transparent), a minimalist structure made of string, the sculpture’s shadow reveals a direct reference to the familiar symbol of Nazism.

Other works, such as Renate Bertlmann’s Carmen – Enfant Terrible 2001, explore the connections between patriarchal and sexual power. Bertlmann uses kitsch materials and objects found in sex shops to parody a fantasy of feminine passion. Eva Wipf’s Untitled (With Crown of Thorns) 1976 combines items the artist found in junk shops and flea markets to explore the uneasy relationship between religious and sexual iconography.


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