Marie Rothschild’s iconic Surrealist Ball in 1972 drew inspiration from experimental art movements from the 1920s and ’30s that remain pivotal today. Dadaist collage artists between world wars paved the way for the Freudian-inspired Surrealists, unleashing a wave of creative anarchy that opened the floodgates for conceptual art to come. A line by the French poet Lautréamont, describing “a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” became a rallying cry for André Breton and his irreverent fellow Surrealists, who proceeded to delve into the subconscious, rip things asunder, and rearrange the pieces to reflect the chaos swirling around them. One hundred years after Breton's groundbreaking manifesto rocked the art world in October 1924, a spirit of unfettered experimentation and challenging the status quo lives on.
The work featured in Surrealist Ball, selected from submissions to NOT REAL ART’s biennial grant, maintains this “mad alchemist” tradition. Weaving elements of Dadaism and Surrealism into analog and digital media, these artists combat racism, confront gender roles, upend traditional concepts of fashion, and relish the unpredictability of the creative process. Donning costumes and masks and exploring suppressed longings and desires, they combine and rearrange unrelated objects and images to challenge our perceptions and redefine what is real. Working with performance, photography, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, and collage, they infuse new energy into Surrealist tropes while setting off in their own directions. Frida Kahlo described Surrealism as “the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts.” Following her lead, the artists in Surrealist Ball celebrate the accidental beauty of random juxtapositions that cause us to reevaluate, reconsider, and reflect.
View Surrealist Ball, then scroll down for details about the artists and their work.
Tearing Things Apart
Raul Hausman, Kurt Schwitters, and Hannah Höch clipped images from newspapers, magazines, and books to critique the failed social and political systems that led to the devastation of World War I. Like their Dadaist predecessors, contemporary collage artists enjoy tearing things apart. “Feeling Dangerous” by Christine Sayers features a woman wielding a giant pair of scissors to call out the rampant sexualization of women in advertising. Lisa Martel combines images of birds with fashion models and flowers to spotlight threats to their shared habitats. Hannah Freitag and Shizu Homma juxtapose views of a black tie event, a children’s birthday party, and imperiled landscapes to address environmental disasters and political divides. In her illustration “The Party,” Lissy Walker meticulously arranges vintage figurines and domestic artifacts to explore the history scattered around us. “Take Your Medicine,” a wry, vice-strewn take on 21st-century obsessions by Marie Magnetic, reflects on “the mundane, the morose, and the magnificently mad.”
Fantasy and Desire
Sigmund Freud and his fascination with subconscious impulses led avant-garde artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, Dora Maar, and Luis Buñuel to uncover a minefield of repressed desires through surreal landscapes, interiors, portraits, and films. Sharing a similar obsession with fantasy and eros and probing our innermost longings, Rowynn Dumont’s seductive collodion wet-plate portrait of “Maggie” and Erin Naifeh’s mystical “Electrocution: A Fatal Orgasm” play with the tension between internal and external realities, inviting viewers to fill in the blanks. Linda Joy Mullen’s evocative fashion design assembled from recycled materials, Woman the Creator’s soaring “Fearless” montage, and Jeannie Worley’s collaged portrait of “Gaia” exude a subliminal sensuality that extends far beneath the surface. a.r. havel’s hedonistic photo still of a faux theatrical performance, “The Butcher of Las Sirenas,” and Vincent Keele’s vibrant painting “Dancing Shoes” radiate a heady mixture of exuberance and yearning.
Animals and Masks
Merit Oppenheim’s suggestive fur tea cups in the 1930s, Leonora Carrington’s inscrutable paintings of women with animals and birds, and Man Ray’s attraction to primitivism and masks still feel relevant today. Following a Surrealist tradition of incorporating animals and symbols from dreams into everyday scenes, photographer June Kim crouches on a sofa with a wolf-like dog, and Mitch Kern poses in an antler mask to explore the nebulous barriers between human and animal, suburbia and the wild. Deming King Harriman’s plague-inspired “Masks VIII” and Grace Weston’s feminist take on Magritte, “Ceci. N'est Pas un Homme,” probe the contemporary significance of masking while referencing the past. Mary Cheung’s elaborately staged tea party with an ominous furry animal and Josey Seung-Ah Lee’s enigmatic stag costume blend fantasy and fairy tales with role-playing and performance.
Telling Juxtapositions
Like the intrepid Dadaists and Surrealists who preceded her, Eszter Sziksz combines incompatible images and materials to investigate the elusive passage of time. Her knowing eyeball on melting ice includes video to capture its disintegration. In the mixed-media collage “In the Ya Face Now Too!” Shari Phoenix layers racist caricatures over a Renaissance-style portrait to call out centuries of historical bias. Dre McLeod’s esoteric “Divine Self” tapestry blends a Surrealist vibe with undertones of Baroque. Natasha Overton’s elegant Raku skull with roses narrates her struggles with grief by reusing functional pottery that didn’t turn out as planned. In the montage “Children of the Sun,” Fernando Ramos places a transparent baby carriage next to a headless woman in pink in front of a pyramid to evoke awe and unease in the viewer. In the startling fashion shoot “Incased,” Kelsey Ann Kasom drapes models in simulated industrial hosing to rethink stereotypical notions of glamour and subtly dig at the restrictive background of women’s attire.
All photos published with permission of the artist(s); featured graphics for Surrealist Ball by David Schwartz.