In Wonderland: A Journey Through The Fantastical World of Women Surrealist Artists

Driven by an impulse for independence and self-expression, women  surrealist artists were masters at creating art that shocks, delights, and amazes.

Co-organized by LACMA and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States is the first large-scale  international survey of women surrealist artists in North America. Spanning more than four decades, this exhibition presents the work of 47 extraordinary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington, and more.

The extensive range of work date primarily from about 1930 (the period when Lee Miller and Rosa Rolanda first experimented with surrealist photograph techniques) to 1968 (the year that Yayoi Kusama presented her landmark happenings, "Alice in Wonderland," in Central Park).

Most prominent in the show are the couple, and group portraits, and narrative fables, that exemplify the women's friendships, loves, and families, and convey the difficulties and dramas often involved in such relationships. For instance, the portrayal of love and marriage ranges from storybook romances by Sylvia Fein and Remedios Varo; an obsessive fascination for a lover, Frida Kahlo portraits herself in miniature alongside her husband Diego Rivera; and cynical courtship scenes by Leonora Carrington and Gertrude Abercrombie.

" This expansive survey illustrates that North America offered these women a degree of independence they could not experience in Europe. Hence it became for them a land of reinvention, their wonderland."
~~ Ilene Fort, exhibition curator and LACMA curator of American art

In Wonderland

Courtesy LACMA

Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States 

On view from January 29-May 6, 2012

LACMA, Los Angeles
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