KENDAL.- This exhibition comprises key British surrealist works from the extraordinary collection of Dr Jeffrey Sherwin, a GP by profession, who has built up the largest collection of British surrealist art in the country over a period of more than 25 years. What is most remarkable about the collection is the diversity of styles and imagery - unlike other key artistic movements, surrealism has never had a single overriding visual aesthetic, and has constantly reinvented its means of poetic expression. Although unified most strongly as an official movement in Britain in the 1930s and 40s, this exhibition will show that surrealism continued, and continues, to infect the work of modern and contemporary artists, from Desmond Morris and Conroy Maddox to Eduardo Paolozzi, John Davies and Damien Hirst.

Surrealism was born in Paris in the 1920s but quickly spread overseas to become an international phenomenon. While few of the surrealist artists in Britain reached the same level of fame as many of their counterparts across the English Channel, the images they created were every bit as powerful, mysterious and provocative, taking inspiration from the language of dreams and revolutionary politics, while rebelling against the tyranny of prevailing sexual, religious and social conventions.

The exhibition will start with the earliest British surrealist works from the 1920s and early 30s, showing how the movement’s ideals were already manifesting themselves well before the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, held in London and attracting over 1000 visitors a day, exposed a wider public to the radical imagery of surrealism. As the movement flourished its imagery became more powerful, political (this was the period of the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of the Second World War), and intense in its unlocking of the imagination– from the psychoanalytical experiments of Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff to the investigation of gender and sexuality in the works of female surrealists such as Emmy Bridgewater and Ithell Colquhoun, and from the ominous war-themed paintings of Merlyn Evans and John Banting to the mysterious twilight landscapes of Roland Penrose and Toni del Renzio.

Throughout the rest of the twentieth century, and continuing into the twenty-first, the all-pervading influence of surrealism can be found everywhere. The last section of the exhibition will be crammed full of paintings, drawings and constructions, reflecting Jeffrey Sherwin’s intuitive ‘joined-up writing’ approach to collecting, and represented by a whole range of artists, including Desmond Morris, John Welson and Anthony Earnshaw.