‘Forbidden Territories’ Misses the Wood for the Trees

Nothing quite makes sense at first. Grey lines jut all over the place, gathering into tight clusters like manic cross-hatching. It takes a second or two to realize what you’re looking at: a craggy cliff face, viewed from a boat just offshore. Unlike other examples of Dora Maar’s work, Falaises (Cliffs, 1935) – which is currently on display in ‘Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes’ at The Hepworth Wakefield – has not been heavily edited. It really is just a cliff face, each fold and bulge of rock part of the natural landscape. Maar’s photograph suggests a radical way of looking at nature: her image shows the crag to be simultaneously real and surreal, a familiar geographical landmark that, if you zoom in on it, is also an unrecognizable, expressive constellation of lines, shapes and shadows. More than just a skilful photograph, Falaises is a way of looking, an invitation to experience the oddness of our world.

Other photographic works in ‘Forbidden Territories’ – which brings together depictions of surrealist landscapes by more than 40 artists spanning the 100-year period since the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 – achieve similar effects. The strange mass in Edith Rimmington’s Untitled (Sea Shore Photographs 3) (c.1960s), for instance, looks like an island in the middle of a muddy river, brown water rushing around it, threatening to consume it entirely. Closer attention, however, reveals a different truth: this is a photograph of a large rock on a beach, half-buried in sand. Offering a playful reimagining of surrealism, Rimmington – who joined the British Surrealist Group in 1937 as one of its few female members – asks the viewer to fill in the blanks by tapping into their own, child-like subconscious. Whilst many other works in this sprawling historical survey present outré constructed landscapes, Rimmington’s minimal photographs stand out as quiet, intelligent experiments in defamiliarization.

Yet, despite Maar’s and Rimmington’s experimental photographs being squeezed into a room dominated by a large and lacklustre sculpture by Ro Robertson (Interlude II, 2024), a substantial section of the exhibition is given over to a solo presentation by Mary Wykeham, a British artist and poet whose work has rarely been shown. The result of a recent donation to The Hepworth Wakefield, this display of the artist’s paintings and prints is the largest since 1949. A gallery wall text suggests that one of the reasons Wykeham – who spent 15 years of her life as a nun – has largely been written out of the history of the movement may be that many, including Breton, ‘did not believe that any form of religion and spirituality could exist alongside surrealism’. Perhaps. However, works such as Hurricane I (1986) and Hurricane II (c.1987–88) – a pair of simplistic etchings featuring long, coiling squiggles – suggest it might equally be that some of her art simply isn’t very good. Presenting over 50 works by Wykeham, this selection buries a handful of relevant works – including an etching of the Hoggar Mountains in which layers of blue lines look like rippling water (Sahara – Hoggar, 1991) – amidst a sea of middle-of-the-road prints and paintings.

In another gallery, Swiss artist Nicolas Party has composed a mural directly onto the gallery wall, in which a cluster of trees all appear to be in different stages of senescence: two boast green leaves, whilst the rest are varying shades of yellow, orange and red. The work’s uninspired title, Trees (2024), evinces the sophistication of Party’s effort here: it’s a shame to see an artist who has genuine ability phoning it in, his trees daubed onto the wall as if he were decorating a school classroom. Hung directly on top of this large mural is Max Ernst’s Cage, fôret et soleil noir (Cage, Forest and Black Sun, 1927): the painting – bathed in darkness with a small, glistening cage at its centre – is compelling, the murky application of paint forcing viewers to step closer to try and make out what, exactly, is going on. These two works exist together in the exhibition, but the relationship is vampiric: Party’s mural gains from association with a figure like Ernst, but the benefit is not reciprocal. This posthumous collaboration feels like nothing more than the younger artist hitching his wagon to Ernst’s star power.

This is not to say that all of the contemporary pieces pale in comparison to the historical ones. Two unnerving sculptures by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, for instance, are particularly striking: one configures a mountain which seems to have grown angular legs like a tarantula (The Gulf Project Camp: Sculpture #4, 2019); the other comprises a hill from which grows a turkey-like head, thick lashes curled up around its eyes (The Gulf Project Camp: Sculpture #1, 2019). By pairing these works with Salvador Dalí’s Mountain Lake (1938), the exhibition illustrates the continuing relevance of a 100-year-old movement to contemporary artists while reminding viewers that surrealism has had global impact. Yet, despite the inclusion of many strong works and a worthy attempt to widen the art-historical canon, there remains a large amount of filler in this baggy show, which risks obscuring a number of subtle yet extraordinary surrealist jewels that truly merit our time and close attention.

‘Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes’ is on view at The Hepworth Wakefield until 21 April 2025

_{Main image: Ithell Colquhoun, Arbour, 1946, oil on board, 39 × 49 cm.}