Art Basel 2022 | Booth H2

Galerie Knoell presents a retrospective exhibition of works by Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985), the leading female proponent of Surrealism and one of Switzerland’s most important postwar artists. The display will allow viewers insight into the quintessence of Oppenheim’s artistic process over nearly half a century, from the 1930s to the 1970s. Subtitled Super.natural, Oppenheim was fascinated by the forces of nature throughout her lifetime, subversively transforming them by passing them through a supernatural lens.

When Meret Oppenheim moved to Paris at the age of eighteen, she soon became active as an artist in a circle that included Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. The first woman artist associated with the Surrealist group, she made a substantial contribution to the Surrealist Manifesto. It was at Breton’s invitation that she contributed her iconic Object - also known as Déjeuner en fourrure - to the first Surrealist exhibition of 1936. When Alfred H. Barr spotted it at the opening, he promptly acquired it for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Though she encountered major impediments as a woman to pursuing her work as an artist in the twentieth century, Oppenheim persisted in her lifelong career. In addition to her legacy as an artist, that career has inspired countless woman artists and other contemporary cultural figures, and she has indeed become a feminist role model more generally. This was due not least to the acclaimed speech she delivered in 1975 in Basel in which she gave clear voice to the challenges and disadvantages she faced as a woman in the art world; an intensive exchange with Valie Export, published that same year, also contributed substantially to her reputation.

Galerie Knoell's exhibition provides a retrospective overview on the occasion of the major Oppenheim survey that opened in 2021 at the Kunstmuseum Bern, has travelled to the Menil Collection in Houston and will move MoMA in New York later in 2022. Additionally, Oppenheim will feature in the 2022 International Exhibition of Art at the Arte Biennale, Venice, curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Oppenheim’s power to transform or transcend nature by passing it quite literally through the sphere of the “supernatural” bears on the human realm as well. It informs the numerous allusions to magical and alchemical interrelationships, for example in Das Zelt des Zauberers (The Tent of the Sorcerer, 1945) and in the paradigmatic collage Hier wohnt die Hexe (Here lives the Witch, 1956), which occupies a key place in the presentation. A late collage like Tombant du Ciel (Falling from the Sky, 1969) ultimately demonstrates that the interface between the natural-earthly and the supernatural-otherworldly should not only be thought of in terms of sublimation but, conversely, can also take the form of a downward plunge. The fall from heaven awakens memories of the ancient myth of Icarus plummeting from the sky in his chariot after flying too close to the sun. That this overlapping of natural and supernatural also opens up the terrain vague between the two sexes is of central importance to an artist like Meret Oppenheim. In the era of witch hunts, it was precisely the figure of the sorceress that society sought to banish—and, with it, to banish the embodiment of a femininity that perturbed and threatened the patriarchal order.