She is surreal
Friday, 9 January to Saturday, 28 February 2026
Group exhibition with works by women artists who use surreal aspects in their practices.
Participating artists: Wanda Stang, Jutta Scheiner, Mirja Gastaldi, Manita Kaewsomnuk, Olivia Berger and Nena Cermak
Many have believed that surrealism was dead. Many wrote so. Childish nonsense: its activity extends today to the entire world and surrealism remains livelier, more audacious than ever. Surrealism, which never for a single instant ceased to stand in service to the greatest emancipation of humankind, wanted to sum up the entirety of all its efforts in one magical word: freedom. (Suzanne Césaire)
Surrealism has always existed. The unconscious, dream-driven, automatic or trance-like creativity have always been part of human artistic expression. Works by Hieronymus Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Symbolist painters such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon bear witness to this. Even if it took Sigmund Freud and André Breton to give the unconscious – and thus the surreal – a name.
The feminine plays a central yet ambivalent role in surrealism. In the male-dominated movement of the early 20th century, women were often portrayed as muses, dream figures or symbols of the unconscious. They embodied the mysterious, the erotic and the irrational – all those qualities that the Surrealists sought in their rejection of rational order. The feminine became a projection screen for male fantasies.
And yet it was and is precisely female artists who independently developed the surreal perspective. Leonor Fini, Jane Graverol, Rachel Baes and Unica Zürn broke with the role of the passive muse and created works that focus on female subjectivity, magic and transformation. Their surrealism is often more introspective and deals with themes such as identity, the body, sexuality and the relationship with nature.
As Suzanne Césaire put it in her 1946 text Le Grand Camouflage, the feminine in surrealism is an expression of a deep search for self-determination.
The six female artists shown in this exhibition take up a wide variety of surreal aspects in their respective artistic practices, thus emphasising the continuing relevance of surrealist thinking – perhaps especially in our times.
Jutta Scheiner, Apophis, 2025, 65x50cm, Oil on Paper
Bios