Surrealism as feminist resistance: artists towards fascism in Leeds

How can surrealism be reimagined as feminist resistance? That is the query that drives ‘The Traumatic Surreal’ on the Henry Moore Institute, an exhibition that unpacks the generational trauma left by Nazism for postwar girls. Drawing on co-curator Patricia Allmer’s guide of the identical title, it options work by Germanophone artists who use surrealist sculptural traditions to problem the Nazi credo of Kinder, Kirche, Küche (Youngsters, Church, Kitchen). Beneath a regime that enforced girls’s subjugation to domesticity, cages – each literal and figurative – severed tails, blades, feathers, and hair recur all through.

Coinciding with the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto, ‘The Traumatic Surreal’ additionally critiques the sexist leanings of surrealist artwork: eroticising girls and infantilising them, too. In 1924, poet André Breton lamented the formal constraints of realism and rationality, urging artists and writers to discover goals, hallucinations, and unfiltered thought as an alternative. The ensuing artwork gave us mirage-like landscapes and dripping clocks, elevating figures like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte to family names. However even ostensibly ‘radical’ surrealists have been no much less vulnerable to violent depictions of the feminine physique – consider Hans Bellmer’s dismembered dolls and Helmut Newton’s sadist photos.

Taking this as their cue, the artists featured right here reappropriate the motion’s shock ways of fragmenting femininity into eroticised part-objects – lips, ft, and arms. Take, for example, Renate Bertlmann’s Carmen – enfant horrible (2001): a shiny crimson material and Perspex sculpture full with a pink Godemiche dildo. Taking a look at Ex Voto (1985) – a pair of heart-shaped breasts – head-on, this view conceals a blade protruding from the nipple. The kitsch high quality of Bertlmann’s sculptures can also be echoed by Ursula’s Pandora’s Giant Cupboard (1966), a carnivalesque show of color and furs from a coat that belonged to the artist’s mom.

Early surrealist objects typically juxtaposed items related to femininity, resembling home gadgets (irons, spoons), or clothes (footwear, gloves). Combining these objects and obfuscating them of their authentic which means, it’s this means of ‘collocation’ that’s key for Allmer. Meret Oppenheim’s severed squirrel tail within the beer glass contrasts the mushy femininity of the fur with the agency masculinity of the glass. Elsewhere, Eva Wipf’s gilded shrine gestures to her personal Catholic heritage, full of allusions to Klimt’s Tree of Life and a number of other pilgrimage shrines.