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

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.