Renate Bertlmann in conversation with Patricia Allmer and Clare O’Dowd

Leading Austrian avant-garde artist Renate Bertlmann joins The Traumatic Surreal curators Professor Patricia Allmer and Dr Clare O’Dowd for a wide-ranging exploration of her diverse artistic practice, which spans painting, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture and performance.

Surreal and often shocking, Bertlmann’s work seeks to challenge and deconstruct binary structures and to confront the social stereotypes assigned to masculine and feminine behaviours and relationships.

The Traumatic Surreal exhibition includes four of Bertlmann’s sculptures, which use a diverse range of materials to deal with themes of sexuality, love, gender, and eroticism.

About the speakers

Renate Bertlmann
Artist

Renate Bertlmann (born in 1943 in Vienna) is a leading Austrian feminist avant-garde visual artist. Since the early 1970s her work has focused on issues surrounding themes of gender and sexuality within a social context, with her own body often serving as the artistic medium. Bertlmann became the first woman artist to represent Austria at the Venice Biennale when her work Discordo ergo sum was shown there in 2019, and Vienna’s Belvedere held a major retrospective of her work in 2023-4.

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.