Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition - by Natalie Dupêcher & Anne Umland & Nina Zimmer (Hardcover)

About the Book

Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (22.10.2021-13.02.2022) / The Menil Collection, Houston, USA (25.03-18.09.2022) / The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (30.10.2022-04.03.2023).

Book Synopsis

How the celebrated Surrealist traversed the many movements of 20th-century art with a thrilling disregard for categories and constraints

Over the course of her protean career, Meret Oppenheim produced witty, unconventional bodies of work that defy neat categorizations of medium, style and subject matter. "Nobody will give you freedom," she stated in 1975, "you have to take it." Her freewheeling, subversively humorous approach modeled a dynamic artistic practice in constant flux, yet held together by the singularity and force of her creative vision.
Published in conjunction with the first ever major transatlantic Meret Oppenheim retrospective, and the first in the United States in over 25 years, this publication surveys work from the radically open Swiss artist's precocious debut in 1930s Paris, the period during which her notorious fur-lined Object in MoMA's collection was made, through her post-World War II artistic development, which included engagements with international Pop, Nouveau Réalisme and Conceptual art, and up to her death in 1985. Essays by curators from the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Modern Art critically examine the artist's wide-ranging, wildly imaginative body of work, and her active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art, providing the context for her creative production pre- and post-World War II.
Meret Oppenheim was born in 1913 and lived in Germany and Switzerland during her childhood. At the age of 18, she moved to Paris to study art, and there exhibited alongside members of the Surrealist group. Oppenheim returned to Switzerland in 1937, where she trained as a conservator at the Basel School of Design. Already a storied member of the pre-World War II avant-garde, in the last two prolific decades of her life she was embraced by a younger generation of artists for her conceptual approach to art and progressive views on gender. Oppenheim died in 1985.

Review Quotes

Certainly proves the artist's versatility and changeability.--Ted Loos "The New York Times"

Makes a persuasive case for Oppenheim as more than just a Surrealist wunderkind...She also had a wonderful sense of humor, a sharp eye for color, and the good sense not to fade into obscurity after her early success.--Marley Marius "Vogue"

Proves the Surrealist to be an artist of endless creativity and incredible versatility who drew, painted, and sculpted in a wide range of media and materials.--Sarah Cascone "Artnet"

She maintained an unusual gift -- exemplified by "Object" -- for simply putting unlikely things together in convincing, somewhat unsettling ways. They could be anything -- found objects, materials, mediums, motifs or styles. These conjoinings were always aided by a meticulous sense of craft...--Roberta Smith "The New York Times"

Offers new scholarly perspectives and a rich body of imagery (more than 160 plates), assuring that the artist's renown will go beyond Object affording and the greatest pleasure for the reader.--Barbara Stehle "Women's Art Journal"

Meret Oppenheim's quasi-functional Surrealist objects violate quotidian logics in uncanny ways.--Emily Watlington "Art In America"