Meret Oppenheim: Porträt mit Tätowierung, 1980. Kunstmuseum Bern, Hermann
und Margit Rupf Stiftung
Photo: Heinz Günter Mebusch, Düsseldorf
© VBK, Wien,
2012/13 / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2012/13
Berlin is dedicating a first major
retrospective to Meret Oppenheim to mark the centenary of the famous artist's
birth here on 6
October 2013. The playful and humorous treatment of everyday
materials, conveyed with constantly new connotations, is a special feature of
Oppenheim’s artistic works and links her to her artist friends whose company
included Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and Man Ray. The photographs
in the “Érotique voile” series (1934), in which Man Ray posed his model, are
now among the most outstanding works of surrealism in the Parisian circles of
which Oppenheim was highly acknowledged. The discursive power of her surrealism
could be felt in 1983 when her Oppenheim Fountain was inaugurated in Bern’s
Waisenhausplatz, a visit to which is highly recommended.
The reception of Meret
Oppenheim’s extremely diverse oeuvre, influenced by experimentation and
upheavals, metamorphoses and the “dream-like”, has not always been easy. The
artist dispensed with uniformity or recognisability in favour of experimental
joyfulness which enabled her to transcend the confines of an artistic style, a
genre or a linear development.
Language, myths, games
and dreams served her purpose as impetus just as literary sources and the
psychoanalysis of C.G. Jung. “Freedom isn’t given to you – you have to take
it”, Oppenheim summed up her position in 1975.
Her emancipatory,
non-conformist attitude and her critical approach to social stereotyping and
allotted gender roles made her a central identification figure for following
generations of women artists.
The exhibition will
show the whole spectrum of Meret Oppenheim’s oeuvre, which in its independence
and diversity is still a pioneering force even today. Following Oppenheim's
artistic method, who kept returning to specific motifs over long periods of
time and subjected them to new treatment, the show runs a course through the
ever-densifying themes in a cross-section of the artist's creative periods:
magic objects, dream scenes and myths, depictions of the invisible,
cadavre-exquis and play as an artistic method, the search for identity,
metamorphoses between the sexes, between human being and animal, nature and
civilization. Starting out from her much appraised early work in the circle of
the surrealists and proceeding to her less well-known poetic late work, the
exhibition will show not only drawings, paintings, objects and collages, but
also her writings and dream notations as well as her humorous and fantastical
jewellery, dress and other designs. “Every idea is born with a form. You never
know where the ideas come from: they bring their form with them; just as Athena
sprang out of the head of Zeus, helmeted and armoured, thus do the ideas emerge
with their apparel.”
In 1982, Meret
Oppenheim was honoured with the Art Prize of the City of Berlin. In the same
year, she participated in documenta 7. Shortly before her death, she became a
member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. She died in Basel in 1985.
The retrospective is
being produced in close cooperation with the artist’s family and with the
Kunstmuseum Bern, home of the Meret Oppenheim Archive, which owns in the
artist's legacy the most important collection of Meret Oppenheim's works.
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