Exhibition of the week Dreamers Awake
White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1 (020-7930 5373, whitecube.com). Until 17 September
“Surrealism was a movement dominated by men and obsessed with women,” said Louisa Buck in The Daily Telegraph. In its most famous images, the female form is rarely shown as anything other than an “object of masculine desire and fantasy”. Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and the rest tended to depict women as little more than erotic set dressing. Even so, surrealism was immensely appealing to female artists. A standout among them is photographer Jo Ann Callis, whose work, in particular the haunting Untitled (c.1976), is “intense, unsettling and eroticallycharged”. This “terrific” show at White Cube demonstrates how such women carved their own space within the macho surrealist canon, bringing together the work of more than 50 female artists from the 1930s to the present day. It illustrates how female surrealists embraced the movement’s “liberation of the subconscious” and provided an enduring influence for successive generations of artists. It contains a wealth of “striking and often subversive” exhibits, encompassing paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs and film, and sheds welcome light on a number of undeservedly obscure artists.
The exhibition is packed with works depicting female body parts, said Olivia Laing in The Guardian, but almost always the female form is presented as a “disgusting” spectacle with a “capacity to horrify”. One of the oldest works here is a “bleak little photograph” taken by Lee Miller in 1929 – a “stomachchurning” sight of an amputated human breast served up on a dinner plate. Yet for all the gore on show, there is wit aplenty, especially in the recent offerings. Young British Artist Sarah Lucas presents a marvellous “lewd eye gag” with The Kiss (2003), a sculpture consisting of two chairs tied together and “cartoonishly embellished” with sexual organs created from piles of cigarettes glued together. And Rachel Kneebone offers some frenzied sculptures in which “human and floral forms entwine and interbreed” to “extraordinary” effect.
There’s no shortage of fascinating exhibits, said Francesca Wade in Studio International, but to my mind the idea of an exhibition devoted exclusively to women is itself rather flawed. It may style itself as an “intervention within the art world’s male-dominated landscape”, but the cumulative effect is one of “entrapment” rather than empowerment. Many of the artists represented here made a point of not letting their gender “be at the forefront of their display”; so the fact that their work has been clumped together solely by dint of their sex is just a little depressing.