More than any other Surrealist, the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) embraced, pursued and defined Surrealism's cult of the object, fashioning such classic works as the famous fur cup (at the age of 23!) and the trussed high-heels, infusing everyday domestic objects with a concise eroticism. Yet many facets of her innovative and wide-ranging practice remain unknown to this day, including her extraordinary fountain projects. From the late 1960s until her death, Oppenheim designed and produced models for a series of freewheeling aquatic sculptures. Only three of these have been realized: the "Meret Oppenheim Fountain" in Bern in her native Switzerland, the "Spiral (Nature's Course)" in Paris and the "Hermes Fountain" located in the garden of artist and onetime collaborator Daniel Spoerri in Seggiano, Italy. Fountain Stories is the first to gather all of Oppenheim's fountain projects, including her drawings and unrealized models, into a single definitive publication.

Meret Oppenheim: Fountain Stories

Gardner, Belinda

Reference

Hatje Cantz

The title of this pocket-sized monograph says it all. Whether painting a gorgeous Monica Vitti-esque bombshell leaning on a Del Monte ketchup bottle in 1971, a Matisse-inspired redhead reclining on an abstracted chair or an Uma-Thurmanish blonde laying on a giant pack of 5 Flavor Life Savers, the rebel figurative painter Mel Ramos is widely viewed as one of the most significant representatives of the California Pop movement. Like his colleagues in the New York Pop scene, he began his career as a commercial artist and was interested in the everyday myths of his time, from comic-strip figures to the synthetic dreams proposed by the advertising world. Since 1963, Ramos has fleshed out just about every popular erotic fantasy of women, from the cartoon superheroine to the dominatrix to the pinup girl. He has also turned an ironic eye to the classical female nude, painting cyclical series of the love lives of the ancient gods and painterly paraphrases of classical masterpieces by Ingres, Manet, Modigliani and de Kooning. With an interview of the artist by Belinda Grace Gardner.

Mel Ramos: I Love Women

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Kerber

Hamburg-based artist Friedrich Einhoff's blotchy, relic-like paintings depict a sweetly melancholic realm of seemingly dispossessed, genderless beings with obscured faces who seem to be suspended between worlds. At once eerie and seductive, Einhoff's work inhabits a realm of his own devising, of which the paintings appear as documents or snapshots.

Friedrich Einhoff

Hofmann, Werner

Mewes, Claus

Einhoff, Friedrich

Individual Artists

In recent decades, the real legacy of Surrealism for contemporary art has stemmed not from the Surrealists' paintings of disparate and bizarre objects, but from their combinations of actual objects, such as Meret Oppenheim's "Fur Cup" and Dali's lobster telephone. Taking as its departure point the "Surrealist object" as theorized by André Breton in the early 1930s, The Ear of Giacometti looks at the importance of this work for a new generation of artists applying Surrealist conceptions of enigmatic objects and fragments to the fragmentary world we live in today. The volume opens with a six-page cabinet of curiosities display that underscores its object-oriented take on Surrealism, and reproduces works by Arp, Bellmer, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst, Giacometti and Oppenheim alongside more recent objects by Arman, Hubert Berke, Louise Bourgeois, Thorsten Brinkmann, Michael Buthe, Mathias Deutsch, Juul Kraijer, Kiki Smith, Daniel Spoerri, Anette Streyl, Paul Wunderlich and others.

The Ear of Giacometti: Post-Surrealist Art from Meret Oppenheim to Mariella Mosler

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Iconic as a photographic subject and influential as a creator of iconic objects, Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) was both artist and muse, and was uniquely liberated in both roles. In celebration of the centennial of her birth, Mirrors of the Mind looks at Oppenheim’s singular position as maker and subject of art through numerous sculptures, prints, paintings and photographs. From the iconic "Object in Fur" to lesser-known pieces, Oppenheim’s consistently poetical and humorous work continues to find resonance in contemporary art through its candor and economy of means. This substantial, handsomely designed monograph shows the artist to have been an inspirational figure in her own era--for artists such as Man Ray, Picasso and Max Ernst--as well as an important feminist artist.

Meret Oppenheim: Mirrors of the Mind

Baur, Simon

Walda, Christian

<p>More than almost any artist of the twentieth century, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) made a continuous blur of distinctions between art and life, and between art and commerce. Dalí packaged himself as a mass-media experience that impressed even Andy Warhol, who once said of him, “It’s like being with royalty or circus people.” Yet in spite of his fame, Dalí’s legacy is rarely considered. “Le Surrealisme, c’est moi!” was one of Dalí’s most famous self-aggrandizing statements and it serves as an apt title for this luxuriantly produced, faux-leatherbound catalogue. Here, the ongoing influence of Dalí’s art is traced through subsequent generations, from Louise Bourgeois, Philippe Halsman, Andy Warhol, to Jean-Michel Othoniel, Eric Schaal, Glenn Brown, Markus Schinwald and Francesco Vezzoli. Their works are juxtaposed with a selection of some 70 paintings, drawings and sculptures by Dalí.</p>

Le Surrealisme c'est moi!: Hommage to Salvador Dalí

Lomas, David

Fetz, Wolfgang

Genzmer, Synne

Moderne Kunst Nürnberg

<p>Eroticism, women, sex, women, fetishism, women, and obsession--of all the pop artists, it is perhaps Mel Ramos who has dealt most intensively and consistently with these enjoyable subjects. Always bright, always provocative, and always entertaining, his appropriations of some of the most vulgar yet familiar imagery to come out of the 1960s and 70s advertising world never fail to make the viewer blush with shame and almost simultaneously question such a moralistic reaction. If at first sight his paintings and graphic works are mistaken for typical, if raunchy, product placements, the absurdity of a naked girlie riding a giant cigar soon becomes apparent, as does the subtle surrealism of another naked pinup girl holding a giant spark plug in front of a corporate emblem. Sex and consumer culture never looked so good together, or so parodic.</p>

Mel Ramos

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