Meret Oppenheim
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MERET OPPENHEIM Press Release Meret Oppenheim and Friends – Cadavre Exquis 13 December 2018 - 02 February 2019 Opening Thursday 12 December 2019 Karma International is proud to present Meret Oppenheim and Friends: Cadavre Exquis at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. The exhibition displays never before seen works on paper from the early 1970s through 1978. Meret Oppenheim, born in 1913 in Berlin to a Swiss Mother and a German father, became a member of the Surrealist group after relocating to Paris at the age of 18. She quickly became part of the movement’s inner circle, participating in meetings and exhibitions alongside Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti. The French poet André Breton was so impressed by Oppenheim’s early schoolbook drawing X= an Orange Rabbit that he included it as part of his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. By 1936, Oppenheim had her first solo exhibition in Paris. Despite women being largely regarded as subjects and muses of the men who dominated Surrealism (as exemplified by Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and René Magritte), Oppenheim made a place for herself as one of the movement’s central artists and produced some of its most powerful works. Assuming that she, like her artistic peers, must be male, critics and admirers of her work often mistakenly referred to her as “Mr. Oppenheim.” With a wry wit, Oppenheim was keenly aware of how women were regarded by both the Surrealists and society at large. Suffused with humor, eroticism, and menacing darkness, her work reflected her critical explorations of female sexuality, identity, and exploitation. Oppenheim became known for her assemblages, sculptures and works on paper in which she brought everyday and often domestic items into disturbing and humorous juxtaposition. For the Surrealists, such objects served to crack the veneer of civilized society to reveal the sexual, psychological, and emotional motives burning just beneath the surface. After a turbulent time in Paris, Oppenheim moved back to Basel and spent her summers in her parents’ home in Carona, which is still intact and mostly untouched to this day. Oppenheim had a special room for social games in the Carona house where she would invite her friends, serve them a lot of red wine and together they would play parlour games and create the Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse) drawings. It was in this room that Oppenheim’s niece Lisa Wenger recently found this series of works on paper, tucked away in a drawer. The Exquisite Corpse technique was invented by Surrealists and is based off a Victorian parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. This resulted in bizarre phrases or poems such as “Le cadaver exquis boira le vin nouveau“ (The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine), after which the game was named. The Surrealists were drawn to this concept and André Breton reported that it making the drawings started in fun, but eventually became an important pillar of the movement. Oppenheim’s work has been exhibited extensively in museums, notably including a 1967 retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Since then, her work has been the subject of large exhibitions at muse-ums in both Europe and the United States, including the Guggenheim, New York City in 1996, Martin-Gropius- Bau, Berlin in 2013, the Kunstforum, Vienna in 2013 and this year at the MASI Lugano. One of the first artworks acquired by the Museum of Modern Art New York acquired was Oppenheim’s emblemat-ic fur lined teacup Object from 1936. Meret Oppenheim retrospectives are planned for 2019 at MoMA New York, Kunsthalle Bern, at the Menill Collection in Houston, Texas in 2020, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in 2023. The Cadavre Exquis series will be incorporated in these shows. karmainternational.ch .