Suzanne VAN DAMME (1901–1986) was a Belgian post-impressionist painter who evolved into surrealism in the 1940s. She was trained at the Academies of Brussels and Ghent and in Studio L’Effort in Brussels. Early in her career, she was deeply influenced by the work of Belgian compatriot James Ensor. In the early 1930’s, Van Damme moved to Paris, where, in 1941, she came in contact with members of the Surrealist movement, including Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau and André Breton, who exerted a profound influence over her work.

Invited by Breton to exhibit in the iconic 1947 'Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme' at Galerie Maeght in Paris, van Damme firmly established herself as a leading painter within the group. Skillfully incorporating dream imagery, biomorphic forms, and psychologically charged imagery, her paintings caught the attention of the Belgian surrealist Marcel Lecomte, who wrote the introduction to a monograph on her work, 'L’oeuvre de Suzanne Van Damme', published by La Boétie in 1946.

She exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale in 1935, 1954 and 1962; the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1953 and 1957; the Exposition Universelle in Brussels in 1958. When she moved to Florence in the 1950s, she began creating more abstract works before developing a highly personal language charged with signs and symbols - that which she called ideogram art. She has recently been included in major museum exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Berlin (2025); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024); and the Royal Museum for Fine Arts of Belgium (2024).