FIAC 2012
October 18, 2012 - October 21, 2012
Ubu Gallery is pleased to have participated in FIAC 2012. In collaboration with Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, Paris, Ubu Gallery presented a thematic exhibition focusing on the doll in Surrealist art.
Although seemingly innocuous, the doll is an object full of meaning – from mass-produced mannequins to uncanny idols imbued with magic, the doll is an object of paradox. As an inanimate play-thing, the doll becomes a repository for the projections of its owner, filling it with nostalgia for childhood or, as Freud and the Surrealists believed, acting as totems that awaken latent-sexual desires.
From Judeo-Christian Adam to Pinnochio and Offenbach’s Olympia, fashioning a life-less being that becomes real is a literary, artistic and mythic concept explored throughout history. The Surrealists too, were fascinated with the doll, whose presence manifested itself as also the mannequin, automaton and idol. The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme featured mannequin-artwork that questioned consumerism, identity and gender during the new machine age. The German Surrealist Hans Bellmer constructed and photographed life-sized adolescent female dolls to explore permutations and transformations of the body and eroticism. Jindřich Štyrský, the Czech Surrealist and member of the art group Devětsil, would collaborate with Jindřich Heisler nearly a decade after Bellmer’s dolls were created. In their illustrated book of poetry, Štyrský’s photographs of inanimate dolls, figurines and idols from the 1930s are given an ambiguous and uncanny sense of life through Heisler’s animated text.
Ubu Gallery was located at Booth 0.E36, Grand Palais, Paris.
ARTISTS
Hans Bellmer, Janusz Maria Brzeski, Claude Cahun, Joseph Cornell, Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Egon Engelien, Max Ernst, Auguste Herbin, Georges Hugnet, Ray Johnson, Marcel Mariën, Franz Roh, Kurt Schwitters, Jindřich Štyrský, Yves Tanguy, Unica Zürn
SELECTED WORKS FROM THE EXHIBITION
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