Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

Forbidden Territories will mark 100 years of ‘Surrealism’, since its origins in 1924 with the publication of the ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ by the poet and critic André Breton. Surrealism has become one of the most influential artistic, intellectual and literary movements of the 20th Century, and continues to inspire artists working today.

This exhibition will take you on a journey through the fantastical terrains of Surrealism over 100 years, looking at how Surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical, and provide means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms. Trans-historical, thematic groupings of artwork will bring together artists of Breton’s circle from the 1920s, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Eileen Agar, Lee Miller and Max Ernst, among others, alongside later Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Edith Rimmington, Marion Adnams, Conroy Maddox, Desmond Morris and more, and contemporary artists working within the legacy of Surrealism such as Michael Dean, Helen Marten and Portia Zvavahera.

Continuing to create conversations across the century, a final section will bring together new work by contemporary artists María Berrío and Ro Robertson alongside Surrealists Ithell Colquhoun and Mary Wykeham to explore ideas of identity and autofiction within bodies of water. This will be the largest public showing of Wykeham’s work since her solo show of 1945 at the Leger Galleries in London, and marks the donation of a large group of this now underrecognized Surrealist artist to The Hepworth Wakefield.