Trinidad Carrillo, Birding. From the series No Date, 2015 Photo: My Matson/Moderna Museet © Trinidad Carrillo / Bildupphovsrätt 2024
Works in the exhibition
EXHIBITION TEXTS IN LARGE PRINT
A selection of the exhibition’s texts is available in a large-print publication, designed for anyone who needs or prefers to read in a larger format. You can borrow a copy at the museum.
Would you like to read all the texts in large print? Download them as a PDF here: The Subterranean Sky (PDF).
Mud Muse, 1968–1971
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008, USA)
Robert Rauschenberg was influenced by the Dadaists and Surrealists in his early work and exhibited with them several times during his stays in Paris. Despite being well received by the movement, Rauschenberg himself developed a scepticism towards Surrealism, although he appreciated their experimental methods, such as the collage and the use of chance.
Born out of a collaboration between artists, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art & Technology programme, and private companies, Mud Muse features a device that plays various high-frequency sounds in the form of compressed air pushed through valves into an open glass tank filled with a synthetic mud made of glycerine and finely ground volcanic ash. Small bubbling geysers erupt chaotically and randomly – and as the sounds pass through the clay, new sounds emerge.
Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen, 1936/1967
Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985, Schweiz)
A pair of trussed white pumps are served on a silver plate. The heels are adorned with white paper ruffles of the kind formerly used for chicken or lamb chops at fancy dinners. In Surrealist works such as this, objects that don’t “belong together” are often combined, like in dreams. The Surrealists were interested in dreams, sexuality and urges, influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis, which was new at the time. Shoes can also be seen as a fetish, an ordinary object that is charged with sexual meaning.
Several of Meret Oppenheim’s works concern the construction of “femininity”. In that perspective, the string around the shoes can be read as a symbol of how roles are forced upon women. “Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen” is the artist’s own title. Oppenheim has said that the white shoes brought back memories of a childhood nanny.
La Figure rouge, 1927
Joan Miró (1893–1983, Spanien)
In the early 1920s, Joan Miró joined the circle of writers and artists who would come to be associated with the Surrealist movement. By then, he had already begun working with dreams, the unconscious, and automatism. In 1925, the year after the publication of the first Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton, the Surrealist leader, began purchasing works by Miró, which also led to his official entry into the group. The painting “The Red Figure” was in Breton’s possession for many years.
Miró also exhibited in the first Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre, alongside Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Picasso in 1925. Miró continued to work with the Surrealists until 1929 when he grew tired of Breton’s many restrictions. He then gradually distanced himself from the group.
Mythe de la lumière, 1946
Toyen (1902–1980, Tjeckien)
During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Toyen was prohibited from showing her work, but secretly published collages and drawings in which she expressed her hatred of censorship. Toyen hid her friend, the poet Jindrich Heisler, who was Jewish, in her home during the war.
In this painting, a shadow in profile holding out a plant appears against one half of a double door. On the other half, white-gloved hands form the shadow image of a barking dog’s head. The threat against someone’s precarious existence is portrayed with the dream-like logic of collage. After the end of the war, Nazi rule was replaced by Soviet Stalinist totalitarianism. Toyen then decided to go into exile in Paris with her friend Heisler, when André Breton organised an exhibition for Toyen in Paris in 1947.
Don Juan’s Breakfast, 1972
Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012, USA)
In “Don Juan’s Breakfast”, the title suggests the morning after a night of love. The breakfast is a beer stein made of sensual fabrics. A velvet-covered row of buttons holds it together, and in the gaps you can see something resembling skin as the foam rises above all the boards. From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, Dorothea Tanning was a member of the Surrealist group. Her art explored the absurdity of everyday life, and her works often have a sexual undertone.
Tanning did not want to be called a female Surrealist. She often said that both the forces that made her start working as an artist and those that made her continue had everything to do with being human, and nothing to do with being a woman.
