Hexentexte
This talk by internationally renowned scholar of Surrealism Professor Patricia Allmer will discuss the significance of witches and witchcraft in post-war surrealist art by Germanophone women artists. Focussing on how and why women artists adopted, transformed, and re-assigned magical and ritual practices into aesthetic styles, forms, and systems, the talk will explore a range of specific works by artists including the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the Austrians Renate Bertlmann and Birgit Jürgenssen, and the Germans Valeska Gert, Ursula, and Unica Zürn (whose first publication, a collection of drawings and anagram-poems, was titled Hexentexte or Witches’ Writings). In these works, prominent elements of the traditions of arcane knowledge and performance long associated with witchery combine with, and are transformed by, innovative surrealist techniques and strategies of representation to construct new and subversive kinds of art, repurposing myths and tales from the deep folk histories of central Europe to offer a radical commentary on the experiences of modern women.
Speaker’s Bio
Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her many books, exhibitions, and essays have transformed the study of modern and contemporary women artists and surrealism, starting in 2009 with her curation of the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery, the first major exhibition on this topic. Her contribution to art history and her long-term international scholarly impact on the study of women artists and surrealism have been recognised by awards including a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2010) and an Association for Art History Fellowship (2023). Her books include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016) and The Traumatic Surreal (2022), hailed in its Woman’s Art Journal review as “groundbreaking”, offering “new perspectives on female positions and lineages in the history of surrealism”. Her co-curated 2024-25 Henry Moore Institute exhibition The Traumatic Surreal is inspired by and based on this book. Professor Allmer is also a major international scholar of René Magritte, publishing three books on the artist, and delivering the prestigious 2017-18 International Émile Bernheim Programme lectures in Brussels on his work.
Hosted & Curated by
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
