Curators' Tour of The Traumatic Surreal

Join co-curators Professor Patricia Allmer and Dr Clare O’Dowd for a guided tour of our current major exhibition, The Traumatic Surreal.

The exhibition brings together sculptures and films made between 1964 and 2017 that explore women’s experiences in this context, using surrealist traditions to critique and subvert patriarchal constructions of women as ‘objects’.

In these tours, the curators reveal the stories behind the artworks and discuss the ongoing influence of Surrealism in its centenary year.

Both tours have the same content and cover the same topics.

Lunchtime tour: 13:00-14:00
Evening tour: 18:00-19:00

About the speakers

Professor Patricia Allmer
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Edinburgh

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her many books, exhibitions, and essays have transformed the study of modern and contemporary women artists and surrealism, starting in 2009 with her curation of the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery, the first major exhibition on this topic.

Her books include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016) and The Traumatic Surreal (2022). Professor Allmer is also a major international scholar of René Magritte, publishing three books on the artist, and delivering the prestigious 2017-18 International Émile Bernheim Programme lectures in Brussels on his work.

Dr Clare O’Dowd
Research Curator, Henry Moore Institute

Dr Clare O’Dowd is Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Art History prior to joining the Institute in 2019.

As well as teaching, writing and lecturing on modern and contemporary sculpture, she has researched and curated exhibitions at institutions including The Whitworth (Subversive Spaces, 2009) and Castlefield Gallery (No Particular Place to Go, 2019). She now leads the Institute’s Sculpture Research Programme of talks, conferences, fellowships and research-focused exhibitions.