080081 UE Meret Oppenheim (2013S)

When Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) produced her legendary »fur cup« (1936) - André Breton evocatively called it »Le déjeuner en fourrure« - it launched her even at her young age on the path of becoming a central protagonist of French Surrealism. Artistic strategies of alienation, combinatory experiments and metamorphoses, and penetration into the borderlands of eroticism, the subconscious and the suppressed link Oppenheim's early work to that of her artist friends of the time, including Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Leonor Fini, Toyen, and Man Ray. Among other things, the exercise aims to address the controversy of Oppenheim's problematic absorption as »muse« of the Surrealists and as the archetypal ideal incarnate of the Surrealist »femme-enfant«, promoted not least by Man Ray's nude photographs of the artist, published in »Minotaure«; in 1934 with the title »Érotique-voilée«. With this in mind, the exercise therefore endeavours to define Meret Oppenheim's autonomous artistic position in the context of the Surrealist movement. Moreover, it aims to approach to her work after her rejection of the Surrealist movement in the late nineteen-thirties, an extremely multifaceted phase marked by experimentation and upheavals, transformations and the »dreamlike«. In addition, it will explore Meret Oppenheim's non-conformist and emancipatory attitude and her critical artistic confrontation with the social establishment and assigned gender roles. This made her one of the central identification figures in feminism for the following generations of female artists. »Freedom isn't given, it has to be taken«, summarised Oppenheim in 1975.
The exercise is being held as part of the retrospective devoted to Meret Oppenheim in the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna (21 March 2013 to 14 July 2011) and in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (15 August 2013 to 1 December 2013).