Read more about Meret Oppenheim

The first Meret Oppenheim retrospective was held at Moderna Museet in 1967. Interest in her as an artist and pivotal figure of surrealism has been wide-spread over the past decade. Moderna Museet is now showing Meret Oppenheim again, with a selection of works – drawings, objects and paintings – from public and private collections in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and France. This is a smaller retrospective focusing on a few facets of a complex and central artist with an intricate relationship to modernism that goes far beyond the museum’s most famous piece, Ma Gouvernante.

Aged 18, in 1932, Meret Oppenheim left her home town Basel for Paris, and was soon after introduced to André Breton and the surrealists, not forgetting Man Ray and Max Ernst who would be very important in her life. Oppenheim, who was much younger than her established male artist colleagues, was soon taking part in surrealist exhibitions. In the years leading up to the Second World War, she produced some of her key works, including Ma Gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen from 1936 (the Moderna Museet replica is from 1967). When war broke out, Oppenheim, who was of Jewish origin, returned to Switzerland, where she went into a long depression.

The surrealists shared the fashion industry’s fascination for the female body as a projection surface. Many surrealists also engaged in fashion, partly as a way of earning money. Here we find Oppenheim, both as a model and as a designer of jewellery and clothes. Some of her designs were sold to Elsa Schiaparelli, the great creator of Paris fashions in the 1930s. The exhibition will feature Oppenheim’s fur-covered brass bracelets which were made for Schiaparelli, together with some of her fashion drawings. Throughout life, Oppenheim maintained her love for fancy dress and ritual, theatre and carnival. Her performance La Festine (1959), in which she let participants eat a sumptuous meal from the body of a nude woman, will be interpreted by the artist Katrine Helmersson in a recreated version during the exhibition period.

In the course of her life, Oppenheim formulated with growing vigour her abhorrence of the restrictions she felt governed women, and not least women artists. She believed that every individual has a male and a female aspect, and that creativity is androgynous. In the exhibition we can see how Oppenheim reverts again and again to herself, or the female form, as a surface for projection.