Gallery 01:6

DESIRE AND IDENTITY To live as openly and transgressively as they create, is highly valued by the Surrealists, as a work in itself. The ideal is to be free of moral considerations and instead cultivate one’s individuality. Sexuality, identity, object, and subject are recurring themes. The artists create enigmatic art pieces that carry a special charge, often erotically evocative: fetishes intended as keys to the closed chambers of repressed memory. Many Surrealists see desire as the most important motor of man and art. Depicting the most forbidden is seen as an act of resistance against stifling bourgeois ideals. Many explore the dark side of the drive, the violent and sadistic, in works where women are sometimes reduced to faceless objects.

  Like no other art movement in Western Europe prior to it, the Surrealist movement is characterised by the participation of female and queer artists – many in this group explicitly promote gender equality and everyone’s right to their identity and orientation. Yet they do not receive the same recognition or visibility. Influential Surrealists’ notion of the “irrational woman” as muse and catalyst for male creativity is at odds with the recognition of women as individuals and artists in their own right.

  Meanwhile, artists such as Toyen or Claude Cahun are hailed as role models by the Surrealists for their expression of queer identity in both life and art at a time when it is extremely dangerous. “Under this mask, another mask”, Cahun writes. “I will never stop peeling off all these faces.” Their exploration of self-image and gender as a cultural and social construct will prove crucial for future generations of artists, not least the postmodernists of the 1980s. Despite its inherent conflicts, Surrealism will help reshape the playing field of what topics can be addressed in art – as well as how, and by whom, they can be addressed.