Forbidden Territories at The Hepworth Wakefield: a bold celebration of surrealism’s 100th birthday

Forbidden Territories: 100 years of Surreal Landscapes, a new exhibition showing at The Hepworth Wakefield, is a bold and engaging exploration of the important, if unwieldy, body of work that comes under the category of surrealism.

The exhibition has been timed to mark the 100th anniversary of French writer André Breton’s first surrealist manifesto. The publication brought together an incongruous group of artists, writers and philosophers under the flag of surrealism for the first time.

In doing so, the gallery joins many others around the world – commemorations have taken place throughout 2024 in cities such as Paris, Munich and Shanghai. It’s also perfectly complimented by the simultaneous opening of the sister exhibition, The Traumatic Surreal, at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Despite celebrations around the anniversary, as a movement, surrealism has no definite beginning or absolute focus. Although through popular culture most people associate its imagery with melting clocks or men with twirly moustaches, its roots go deep into the diverse substrata of art, philosophy and science.

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As such, it brings with it a bewildering visual and conceptual range, within which many people find it difficult to find a satisfactory sense of meaning.

This is particularly evident when it comes to how viewers (bringing with us our own abundant and diverse experiences) approach particular examples of surrealist art. When looking carefully at the individual paintings and sculptures offered by the Hepworth show, many of us can hold onto the relevance of one part – but not always work out how it connects to others.

In this respect then, our “reading” of the work becomes fragmented and often frustrating. But I’m here to tell you that this was one of the main aims of the surrealist artists – so the best thing to do is to go with it.

The Hepworth exhibition leans into this playfulness, not only with the art work itself but with sensory stations for children, brightly coloured curtains and wall art accentuating the pieces on display.

Stumbling into the unknown

It is with such sense of the partially known, where old social and cultural expectations were disrupted, that the “original” 20th-century surrealist artists emerged. As the exhibition explains, they came blinking out of the brutality of the first world war and into the political and social devastation and reordering to come.

They pushed forward into a new imaginative territory with a bewildering mix of fear and optimism. And they pursued what they understood as a new and potentially redemptive collective freedom. Within it, they could imagine themselves as being part of many disorderly things, rather than isolated by the constrictive order of the previous century.

Fascinatingly, these ideas are still being explored a century later. Forbidden Landscapes showcases contemporary artists who are embracing both surrealism both through the visual form and by exploring its many contradictory meanings. And our modern world provides fertile ground.

Like their 20th-century surrealist counterparts, artists such as Ro Robertson, María Berrío, Helen Marten and Wael Shawky are working in a volatile and potentially dangerous world and imagining art as a redemptive and thereby freeing act.

The German philosopher Nietzsche, influential at the time of the first surrealists, put forward the idea that for many centuries western art in its various practices reordered the horrors of the world into beautiful shapes and vistas.

This act, he argued, made it knowable, safe and palatable. “We have art,” he said “in order not to die of the truth”.

The legacy of surrealism aims to pull back this veil. Surrealist art distorts the world, making it incomplete, incongruous and excessive. It invites us all to find a place within it, however uncomfortable this may be.

Surrealist art always leaves visual and conceptual fissures through which viewers can imagine an imperfect – sometimes excessive or monstrous – but always unfettered future. Fear of the imperfect or unpalatable is reclaimed, restored and refashioned as hope.

As such, the surrealists serve as a reminder that us humans are – and always have been – complex and diverse creatures. We live in a messy, unfathomable, dangerous and compelling world.

Those who stumble learn

As visitors walk through the Hepworth, they can go beyond their own immediate experiences and travel into the realm of the imagined.

In their portrayal of altered and shifting vistas, the works on show become portals. Through them, visitors can imaginatively project themselves forward into a future that is almost upon us.

This is emphasised through the show’s expanded use of the term “landscapes”. The threatening and permeable boundaries between land and sea are eloquently presented in the work of Berrío, Robertson, Ithell Colquhoun and Claude Cahun. Another portal being explored is the human mind itself, by artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

By displaying the original surrealists alongside artists working today, the exhibition shows that the scary world Breton and his contemporaries navigated is one which we still inhabit today. And it remains just as complex. Together, the works create fantastical, puzzling and compulsive worlds within which, together, we dare to stumble.

Joanne Crawford does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.