ART CITIES:London-Dreamers Awake

The thematic exhibition “Dreamers Awake” brings together over 100 works by women artists that explore sexual politics, eroticism, mysticism and identity, Rarely seen paintings by key figures associated with the original Surrealist movement, such as Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington, are shown alongside modern and contemporary artists including Louise Bourgeois & Tracey Emin, Hannah Wilke etc.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Dreamers Awake” features paintings, sculpture, film, photography and installation, and runs across all three galleries at White Cube Bermondsey in London. Expanding on those who identify as Surrealists, the exhibition charts the impact of surrealist sensibilities on art over the decades, showing how the language and ideas of the movement can be recognised in a wide variety of artists’ work. These range from those who create alternative realities or invent fetishistic objects, to those who channel the creativity of the subconscious or play with gender identity. Curator Susanna Greeves explains: “From its earliest days, women were drawn to Surrealism’s emphasis on personal, artistic and political liberty. By foregrounding bodily experience, artists have transformed the ‘Surrealist Woman’ from a symbolic figure to a sentient, thinking being, and a site of self-expression, resistance and creative energy”. The exhibition also includes new works by emerging international artists: Kelly Akashi, Carina Brandes, Sascha Braunig, Hayv Kahraman, Jordan Kasey and Caitlin Keogh. Kelly Akashi’s sculptural objects bear a complex relationship to geometric and industrial forms. Impressionability, material memory, decomposition, and putrefaction are terms that are often used to describe her interest in materials and processes that negotiate the tricky territories of permanence and monumentality within the history of sculpture. Many works in her oeuvre pit traditional materials against their ephemeral counterparts. She often casts organic materials in bronze, an iconic medium of traditional sculpture, and displays these pieces alongside works using short-lived materials such as candle wax.  Carina Brandes’ black and white photographs, which depict hypnogogic scenes of play, are the shadowy phantoms of their referent reality. Without the use of explicitly fantastical elements, she conceives and realizes a self-contained, subjective world; the camera serves the artist as a tool for invention and projection, rather than objective documentation. Sascha Braunig drawing inspiration from the distorted bodies that litter the histories of modern painting, she adapts these legacies to the discomforts and instabilities of contemporary life. In more recent works, her figures seem to turn on themselves, testing their own limits and those of the settings that confine them. While evocatively dystopic, her paintings also subtly empower their vulnerable subjects, advocating a humanist art for an age in which individual experience seems threatened by forces beyond our control. Hayv Kahraman’s work grapples with the marginal spaces between Western and Middle Eastern culture: aesthetics and concepts of gender through her personal history as an Iraqi émigré to Europe and ultimately the US. Her paintings elegantly recall Japanese style calligraphy, Italian Renaissance painting and illuminated Arab manuscripts, though the subjects are deeply and psychologically brutal. Her work calls back to these Western and Middle Eastern art histories, but her aesthetic, as an immigrant, belongs to neither. Jordan Kasey is a painter who creates surreal and sculptural paintings, usually dealing in some way with the human body. Her latest works offer looks at human-esque forms that are proportionally skewed and off-coloured into abstraction, yet still, oddly and distinctly human. Caitlin Keogh’s paintings segment mannequin-like female bodies and surround them with objects, symbols and patterns. Through Caitlin’s sharp, graphic style, her artworks explore the idea of femininity, the body as an object and the self. Reminiscent of illustrations found in instruction manuals, the delicate pastel colour palette allows Caitlin to weave more sinister subjects into the lighter aspects of her painting.

On Presentation are works by: Eileen Agar, Kelly Akashi, Maria Bartuszová, Shannon Bool, Louise Bourgeois, Gabriella Boyd, Carina Brandes, Sascha Braunig, Claude Cahun, Jo Ann Callis, Leonora Carrington, Helen Chadwick, Ithell Colquhoun, Julie Curtiss, Berlinde De Bruyckere, A K Dolven, Tracey Emin, Leonor Fini, Siobhán Hapaska, Mona Hatoum, Loie Hollowell, Donna Huddleston, Elizabeth Jaeger, Cheyenne Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Jordan Kasey, Tomoko Kashiki, Caitlin Keogh, Rachel Kneebone, Eva Kot’átková, Linder, Sarah Lucas, Nevine Mahmoud, Lee Miller, Shana Moulton, Grace Pailthorpe, Mimi Parent, Julia Phillips, Carol Rama, Edith Rimmington, Laurie Simmons, Penny Slinger, Kiki Smith, Alina Szapocznikow, Dorothea Tanning, Rosemarie Trockel, Paloma Varga Weisz, Gillian Wearing, Hannah Wilke, Issy Wood and Francesca Woodman.

Info: Curator: Susanna Greeves, White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, Duration: 28/6-17/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, http://whitecube.com