Celebrating 100 Years of Surrealism at Frieze

Published 100 years ago this October, the Manifeste du surréalisme (Surrealist Manifesto), imagined by poet, writer and psychiatrist André Breton, proclaimed ‘the omnipotence of dream’. Growing out of dadaism’s iconoclasm and influenced by Marxism and Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious and uncanny, what began in Paris as a tight group of male writers and artists quickly expanded its social, political and global reach. 

At Frieze Masters, artists who have been marginalized in the history of surrealism are brought to the fore, including Dora Maar, Baya Mahieddine and Juliana Seraphim. Iconic pieces by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray meet the reactive works of Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, who challenged their surreal eroticization by male peers. 

The evolution of surrealism in step with contemporary politics and experiences is evident at Frieze London. Artists Carol Bove, Leiko Ikemura, Keti Kapanadze, littlewhitehead and Nova Jiang – who debut new work at the fair – reflect the enduring influence of surrealism in their practices, endlessly inspired by its take on gender, dream and nature. 

Art people were squeamish about surrealism’s sexy, pictorial version of the Freudian unconscious. 

Carol Bove

Surrealism’s subversive spirit remains magnetic. For Carol Bove, who shows new steel sculptures with Gagosian at Frieze London, it was the art world’s distaste for surrealism at the turn of the 21st century that piqued her interest: ‘I started thinking about surrealism about 20 years ago. At the time, art people were squeamish about explicit references to intuition. They thought of themselves as serious and rational and were therefore averse to the sexy, pictorial version of the Freudian unconscious that went along with surrealism. It was this collective embarrassment that got my attention.’

Kurt Seligmann was one of several surrealists who met daily at Café Deux Magots in Paris in the 1930s. Deeply influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, like his contemporaries, Seligmann channelled images that emanated from his subconscious into paint and print. What emerges in Seligmann’s works, however, is a vision that also bears the traces of Swiss-German Medieval art history – part of his upbringing – and its dark, anguished scenes. Seligmann’s paintings of crepuscular forms, positioned at the edge of the human and non-human, are presented in ‘The Mirror of Magic’, a solo show curated by Weinstein Gallery at Frieze Masters.

Eva Švankmajerová similarly stretches the notion of the uncanny back in time. A leading proponent of surrealism in Prague in the 1970s, Švankmajerová unlocks the surrealist potential of Czech folkloric imagery. Riddled by fragmentary anatomy and text, Švankmajerová’s paintings, such as her ‘Rébusy’ (Puzzles) (1966–68) series, are infused by her study of puppetry. The first solo exhibition of Švankmajerová in the UK for over 30 years, at Frieze Masters, The Gallery of Everything presents the development of Švankmajerová’s dreamlike imagery towards her daring parodic series ‘Emancipačním Cyklem’ (Emancipation Cycle) (1967–69). 

My world is full of psychical intensity. 

Leiko Ikemura

Lebanese painter Juliana Seraphim is shown in the UK for the first time in a solo presentation of works from the 1950s–90s with Richard Saltoun at Frieze Masters. Layering dreamlike, botanic, sexual and urban imagery, Seraphim’s method enacts the literal meaning of the surréel as beyond reality. ‘My paintings come from deep within me,’ wrote Seraphim. ‘They are surreal and unexplainable.’ This elision of the ‘surreal’ and ‘unexplainable’ is echoed by surrealist artists past and present.

For Leiko Ikemura, this encounter with the unexplainable offers a ‘vivid pathway’ towards her ‘inner life’: ‘Often, when I’m drawing or painting, something unexpected happens and my body creates a subconscious part of my imagery. My world is full of psychical intensity. Sometimes it is violent and painful. It comes from a longing for a synthesis of all kinds of energies.’ Presented by Lisson at Frieze London, Ikemura draws this unnameable intensity to the surfaces of her subjects, both human and animal, across ceramic, glass and paint, suspending them between dream and reality. 

This untiring ability to deliver the unexpected is, in artist Nova Jiang’s eyes, the most striking element of surrealism’s legacy. Jiang reflects, ‘a surprising image can still speak truthfully to our unconscious and undercut oppressive ideologies.’ She is interested in ‘the way the unconscious meets with the world of everyday objects, the overlap between what the mind does and what the body does.’ Jiang’s meticulous compositions seem far removed from the convulsive, automatic creations advocated by early surrealism. In Future (2024), a luminous, milky yellow lemon grows leafless from a glass, its stalk just dipping into the water. Shown with Union Pacific at Frieze London, Jiang’s works ask if the surreal can be considered, delicately offered, and all more the powerful for this temporal quality.

A surprising image can undercut oppressive ideologies.

Nova Jiang

From the movement’s inception to the late 20th century, male surrealists’ pursuit of the unconscious was also an exercise in erotic reverie, positioning their female peers as the objects of their desire. In 1929, Breton identified ‘the problem of woman’ as ‘the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world’. The same year, Man Ray took Demain (1929/62), a photograph portraying his muse Kiki de Montparnasse in a radical double exposure, presented by Prahlad Bubbar in their curated display ‘The Surrealist’s Eye’ at Frieze Masters. 

Another of Man Ray’s eminent Paris models was surrealist Dora Maar, who had a trailblazing photography career of her own. At Frieze Masters, Loeve&Co reveals Maar’s lesser-known painting practice, presenting a previously unseen ensemble of abstract landscapes on canvas and paper produced between 1950–70, following a traumatic period that included the breakdown of Maar’s relationship with Pablo Picasso. While Maar’s peers circulated rumours of her madness, she withdrew to southern France and worked tirelessly on her paintings, conjuring a remarkable, colourful imaginary.

I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse.

Leonora Carrington

Unlike Maar, Leonora Carrington ‘didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse’. Having left London for Paris, with the arrival of World War II, Carrington fled Europe for the US, arrived in Mexico City in 1942 and remained there for the rest of her life. ‘Landscapes of the Mind’, Wendi Norris’s curated show at Frieze Masters, celebrates the influence of Mexican and American cultures on the surrealism of artists including Carrington, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon and Dorothea Tanning. Carrington’s enigmatic paintings are populated by mythological, Celtic-inspired creatures, whose hybrid forms that toy with gender and humanness also emerge in bronze, such as in El Bailarín (The Dancer, 2011), a highlight of this year’s Frieze Sculpture. 

Contemporaries in 1930s Paris, Carrington and Leonor Fini both found the label of ‘surrealist’ restrictive. Fini, whose retrospective opens at Milan’s Palazzo Reale in 2025, worked on canvas to explore performance, androgyny and desire, often depicting a female sphinx who bears her resemblance. Galerie Minsky’s curated presentation at Frieze Masters immerses audiences in the world of dreams that Fini forged with her partner Stanislao Lepri. 

Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine came to prominence in Europe at just 16, when her first solo exhibition was organized by Breton. Despite associating with the surrealists, Baya claimed only to fit into the box of ‘Bayaism’. Presenting work from 1960s–70s, Elmarsa Gallery’s exhibition at Frieze Masters highlights the sociocultural landscape that influenced Baya’s practice and is often eschewed in a blinkered alignment of the artist with the surrealist movement. 

Artists past and present have found their own way towards, through and beyond surrealism. Georgian conceptual artist Keti Kapanadze, whose experimental installation, photographic and text work is presented in a solo show at Frieze London by Gallery Artbeat, did not know she was using surrealist methods when she began making art in the 1990s. ‘In Soviet Georgia, cultural information from the West was so minimal and shredded, that all I could do was complete it in my imagination,’ Kapanadze explains, ‘I found automatic writing by myself, without knowing that the surrealists had also used this method.’ Kapanadze seeks ‘to explain our universe through ephemeral shadows’, something echoed by Glasgow duo littlewhitehead, presented by Nir Altman at Frieze London, who explore the uncanny nature of simultaneous ‘human presence and absence’ in places as varied as ‘empty clothes, bodiless scents, machine imitation and biomorphic shapes.’

A hundred years on from Breton’s manifesto and the beginning of perhaps the most transformative current in modern and contemporary art, artists at Frieze London and Frieze Masters subvert and stretch surrealism’s thematic, political and material relevance. Promoting a descent inwards, unimpeded by rationality, surrealism will always have as many iterations as there are artists. 

Featured Galleries

Gagosian, Frieze London, Galleries, D12

Lisson Gallery, Frieze London, Galleries, D1

Union Pacific, Frieze London, Galleries, A5

Gallery Artbeat, Frieze London, Focus, F16

Nir Altman, Frieze London, Focus, F13

Weinstein Gallery, Frieze Masters, Galleries, stand D6

The Gallery of Everything, Frieze Masters, Spotlight, S4

Richard Saltoun Gallery, Frieze Masters, Spotlight, S8

Prahlad Bubbar, Frieze Masters, Galleries, G3

Loeve&Co, Frieze Masters, Spotlight, S21

Gallery Wendi Norris, Frieze Masters, Galleries, F16

Galerie Minsky, Frieze Masters, Galleries, F14

Elmarsa Gallery, Frieze Masters, Spotlight, S13

Further Information

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.

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^{Main Image: Man Ray, Demain, 1929/62. Gelatin silver print, 29 × 20 cm. Courtesy: Prahlad Bubbar}