exited beyond words…

Harmony by Remedios Varo, so detailed!

In the beginning of this month I was lucky to make it to the last day of the exhibit “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” at LACMA. It was amazing and beyond words. So now, belated and slowly settling down, I want to share a bit of what inspired and exited me about seeing those paintings…

“Mimesis” by Remedios Varo, was haunting as the meditating figure merged into the chair.

I just started reading the exhibition catalog to be able to comprehend the stories of the women involved and also the times back then. Covering the times from 1930-70, most of them were expats fleeing the second world war either to America or Mexico.

Here is a snipped from the prolog by Whitney Chatwick…

Dorothea Tanning

“First this book and exhibition point to a radical rethinking of surrealism as it was outlined in Breton’s manifestos and other writings. In the works on display the powerful roles that Breton accorded erotic desire and the psychoanalytic principles of (male) psychosexual development are redirected to the production of iconographies of the feminine unconscious as it is manifest in dreams, automatic writing, and the erotic. Second, the (male) surealists’ embrace of radical, often aggressive interventions into the materiality of objects becomes, in the work of many of he women included here, and extended exploration of the body as perceived rom within rather than an assault on the body from without. Third, the surrealist cultivation of rapture and disruption becomes, in the hands of many of these women, a means to the formation of new narrative structures that explores the sources of women’t knowledge and power through their relationships to nature and culture, to the animal and the human, and to the psychic avatar and the spirit guide. In the end, women artist made surrealism something uniquely their own, and that fact is everywhere evident in this pictorial “wonderland“.”

and from the exhibit overview from their website…

Francesca Woodman: House #3

“Surrealism called for the destruction of bourgeois culture and traditional standards and advocated intellectual and political liberty. When promoted in North America, these ideals flourished especially among the supposedly “second sex.” In standard studies on surrealism, female artists have been cast primarily as mistresses, wives, or muses—the inspiration for the male fetishized subject matter. This exhibition however explores the legacy of the movement in the United States and Mexico through its influence on several generations of women artists. Unlike their male counterparts, these artists delved into the unconscious as a means of self-exploration that enhanced an often haunting self-knowledge in their quest to exorcise personal demons.”

Francesca Woodman

…they just painted what they were feeling! At at time when women hardly had a voice in most places couldn’t even vote, these women put out into the world (as far as they could, and they may not have even been exhibited but still they exposed) their innermost struggles in quite vivid and unmistakable details and pictures. Some of the paintings/photographs were raw and brutal and then again gentle and delicate, beautiful and also quite shocking. They totally moved me beyond words.

The exploration, the colors, and the way these women were courageous enough to bare their souls (their dreams, their darkest parts) to go against society’s perception of females… it was beyond inspiring. Surrealism has always moved me not only because of the dreamlike and other worldly qualities but also because it allows the mystic and unexplainable to surface.

These paintings felt channeled. They were magical, exquisite, intense, divine, TRANSCENDENTAL. I wanted to take in these paintings with all my senses… just thinking about it I get excited. I have been to famous museums all over the World and have never felt such an intense connection to an exhibit!

Perhaps of the similarities of being expats and in transit, struggles to find a voice, or just being a women and human, those paintings seem to have touched me in the inner core of my heart where we are all connected….