The Traumatic Surreal
Sculpture Galleries, Henry Moore Institute
22 November 2024 – 16 March 2025
- Marking the centenary of Surrealism, this exhibition will showcase sculptural works by women artists from German-speaking countries from the 1960s through to the present day.
- It will explore how women artists used Surrealism and sculpture to navigate the traumas of the post-war legacies of fascism.
- The exhibition focuses on artists and works rarely or never previously exhibited in the UK.
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 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)
“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 the female body and question the position of woman 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 femininity. 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.
Events
A programme of events exploring the themes on display will accompany the exhibition. Full details to be announced.
This exhibition coincides with Forbidden Territories: 100 years of Surreal Landscapes at The Hepworth Wakefield (23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025) which journeys through the fantastical terrains of Surrealism over 100 years, looking at how surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical and provide means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms.
For media inquiries and more information, please contact:
Kara Chatten, Marketing & Communications Manager
Henry Moore Institute
kara.chatten@henry-moore.org
Emily Dodgson, Head of Marketing & Enterprise
Henry Moore Foundation
emily.dodgson@henry-moore.org
Kitty Malton
Sam Talbot
kitty@sam-talbot.com
Matthew Brown
Sam Talbot
matthew@sam-talbot.com
Twitter: @HMILeeds
Facebook: Henry Moore Institute
Instagram: Henry Moore Institute
YouTube: henrymoore
Notes to editors
About the artists
Renate Bertlmann
Renate Bertlmann (b. 1943) is a leading Austrian feminist avant-garde visual artist, who since the early 1970s has focused on issues surrounding themes of sexuality, love, gender and eroticism within a social context, with her own body often serving as the artistic medium.
Her diverse practice spans across painting, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture and performance, and actively confronts the social stereotypes assigned to masculine and feminine behaviours and relationships.
Birgit Jürgenssen
Birgit Jürgenssen (1949-2003) was an Austrian photographer, painter, graphic artist, curator and teacher who specialised in feminine body art with self-portraits and photo series, which have revealed a sequence of events related to the daily social life of a woman in its various forms including an atmosphere of shocking fear and common prejudices.
She lived in Vienna, and apart from holding solo exhibitions of her photographic and other art works, she also taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Bady Minck
Bady Minck (b. 1962) was born in Luxembourg and works as an artist, filmmaker, and producer in Vienna and Luxembourg. She co-founded the AMOUR FOU film production company in 1995. She studied sculpture at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and experimental film at the University of Applied Arts.
Her first film was The Man With Modern Nerves 1988, followed by key surrealist films such as the short Mécanomagie 1996, In the Beginning was the Eye 2003, La Belle est la Bête 2005, and her most recent MappaMundi 2017.
These deeply philosophical works cross different artistic disciplines, from sculpture and animation to literature and poetry. They have been invited to more than 900 international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin and Toronto, and have received numerous awards including the ‘Award for the Cinema of the Future’ at Pesaro in 2003.
Meret Oppenheim
Meret Oppenheim (1913-85) was a German-born Swiss artist and writer working across a wide range of media. She spent her youth in Bernese Jura, South Germany, and in Basel, becoming a painter at 17 after leaving school. Moving to Paris in 1932, she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but worked mainly autodidactically.
Joining the surrealist circle around André Breton, she participated in surrealist exhibitions from 1933, holding her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel, in 1936. In the same year, at the Surrealist objects show at the Charles Ratton gallery in Paris, her Breakfast in Fur 1936 – the work to which her entire career has frequently been reduced – was exhibited.
The rise of Nazism forced her to relocate in 1937 to Basel, where she trained at the School of Commercial arts as a picture restorer, securing herself a source of income. Despite a period of artistic crisis, she continued to produce significant work throughout the war, affiliating herself with the Swiss artist collectives Gruppe 33 and Allianz, and exhibiting with artists such as her close friends Irène Zurkinden and Walter Kurt Wiemken. She created the Spring Feast for the 1959 Exposition InteRnatiOnale Surréalisme (EROS) in der Galerie Cordier, Paris.
Her first retrospective was held in 1967 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 1975 she received the Art Prize of the City of Basel, and she participated in documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. There have been several major international retrospectives of her work, the latest in 2022/23 at Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection, Houston, and MoMA.
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist (b.1962) is a pioneer of spatial video art, and a central figure in the international art scene since the mid-1980s. Since 1984, Rist has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and video screenings worldwide.
Her recent solo exhibitions are Behind Your Eyelid at Tai Kwun Hong Kong (2022), Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2021-22), and Your Eye Is My Island at MoMAK, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (2021) and ART TOWER MITO (2021). She lives and works in Zürich.
Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm)
Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm) (1921-99), known simply as Ursula, was born in Mittenwalde, Germany. A self-taught artist, she worked intensively on painting and poetry and regularly travelled to Paris, where she met the painter Jean Dubuffet in 1954. The two enjoyed a close friendship and Ursula’s works were included in Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.
Until her death in Cologne in 1999, she exhibited regularly in international galleries and museums, including Documenta 6 in 1977. Her works can be found at the National Gallery in Berlin, the Dresden State Art Collections, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others.
Eva Wipf
Eva Wipf (1929-78), the daughter of a Swiss missionary couple, was born in Santo Angelo do Paraiso in Brazil. When she was five, the family returned to Switzerland settling in the vicarage in Buch.
In 1946, she began an apprenticeship as a ceramist at the Zielger pottery factory in Thayngen in the canton of Schaffhausen, during which she taught herself to paint. She held her first solo exhibition in 1949 in Schaffhausen. Further solo exhibitions followed in Konstanz, Graz, and Zürich, with group shows in Schaffhausen, Zürich and Aarau.
After her breakthrough as an artist, Wipf attended several study trips abroad, including to Amsterdam, Munich, and Paris. Between 1953 and 1966, she was part of the Südstrasse artist community in Zürich. From 1965, her large-format collages with political content gradually replaced her painting. She became best known for her shrine-like object assemblages, which she began producing in 1967.
About the Henry Moore Institute
The Henry Moore Institute is situated on The Headrow, next to Leeds Art Gallery, in Leeds city centre’s cultural hub, just a five-minute walk from Leeds Station.
We welcome everyone to visit our Galleries, Research Library and Archive of Sculptors’ Papers to experience, study and enjoy sculpture from around the world.
The Institute can be found in the centre of Leeds, the city where Henry Moore (1898-1986) began his training as a sculptor. Our changing programme of historical, modern and contemporary exhibitions and events encourage thinking about what sculpture is, how it is made and the artists who make it.
As part of the Henry Moore Foundation, we are a hub for sculpture, connecting a global network of artists and scholars, continuing research into the art form and ensuring that sculpture is accessible and celebrated by a wide audience.
The long-established partnership of Leeds City Council and the Henry Moore Foundation began with the development of the Sculpture Study Centre in Leeds Art Gallery in 1982 and led to the development of the Henry Moore Institute in 1993. It now represents an unparalleled collaboration in the collection, study and presentation of sculpture. The Leeds Sculpture Collections lies at the heart of our work together, underpinned by the complimentary research and curatorial expertise of both organisations.
Free entry
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–17:00
About the Henry Moore Foundation
The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by the artist and his family in 1977 to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts.
Today we support innovative sculpture projects, devise an imaginative programme of exhibitions and research worldwide, and preserve the legacy of Moore himself: one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, who did so much to bring the art form to a wider audience.
We run two venues, in Leeds and Hertfordshire, showing a mix of Moore’s own work and other sculpture.
We also fund a variety of sculpture projects through our Henry Moore Grants and Research programmes and we have a world-class collection of artworks which regularly tour both nationally and internationally.
A registered charity, we award grants to arts organisations around the world, with a mission to bring great sculpture to as many people as possible.