Unveiled Desires II | 13 January - 28 February 2026

Opening reception: Tuesday, 13 January | 6pm

Part 2: Erotic Surrealism - Identity, Desire, and the Body

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents the second chapter of Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1880–Today, a two-part exhibition curated by Maudji Mendel of RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women). Dedicated to championing overlooked women artists, the exhibition continues the gallery's wider commitment to reframing Surrealism through the practices of women and queer artists across more than a century.

From its origins in 1920s Paris, Surrealism positioned desire, subversion, and the unconscious at the heart of its radical project. Yet women and queer artists have long redefined the erotic within the movement, not as spectacle, but as a potent force for self-representation, critique, and imaginative freedom. Across painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and textile, Part II explores how eroticism shapes identity and acts as a lens through which psychic and symbolic landscapes are revealed.

The second instalment turns to Surrealism's psychic landscapes, foregrounding how eroticism reveals the unconscious and shapes identity. The exhibition opens with a juxtaposition of two pieces: a monumental photograph by Jo Spence (1934–1992), reflecting on the connection between the erotic and domestic labour, and a visceral sculpture by Cathy de Monchaux (b. 1960), combining industrial rigidity with textile softness to create a sensual and fetishistic allusion to corporeality.

Two soft sculptures by DaddyBears, conceived specifically for Unveiled Desires, are exhibited in the alcoves. Entitled Fantasy Home and Fantasy Garden, these silky black forms float weightlessly and evoke the pliability of dreams. Their tactile presence channels the eroticism of touch, rest, and imagination, echoing Surrealism’s fascination with the charged intimacy of objects.

The second gallery brings together works by Natalia González Martín (b. 1995), Anna Sampson (b. 1993), Síomha Harrington (b. 1997), Marion Adnams (1898–1995), Jane Graverol (1905–1984), Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) and Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), all exploring an artistic fascination with the female body. Though differing in media and period, these artists rethink the existing archetype of conception and representation. Here, the body becomes a site of negotiation, between cultural expectation and lived experience, between desire and myth. In Adnams’ composition, Emperor Moths / Thunder On the Left, female breasts are detached and transformed into autonomous, playful forms, floating spheres of selfhood that disrupt the objectifying gaze by refusing anatomical coherence. Graverol’s figure, by contrast, is truncated at the clavicle, withholding the identity of the subject and challenging the viewer’s desire for narrative closure. Together, their reimagining of the female form establishes a lineage that extends to younger contemporary artists such as Sampson, whose stark black-and-white practice employs seriality, gesture, and material presence to frame the body as an active, self-possessed landscape rather than an idealized object of the gaze. Drawing on feminist critiques of representation, the artists disrupt the stabilising force of archetypes by introducing ambiguity, strangeness, and agency. Their works reimagine the body not as a fixed symbol but as a mutable surface of projection, seduction, fantasy, and resistance.

The final gallery presents works by Suzanne van Damme (1901–1986), Mimi Benoît Parent (1924–2005), Mary Beth Edelson (1933–2021), Tali Lennox (b. 1993), Natalia González Martín (b. 1995), Bona de Mandiargues (1926–2000), Constanza Pulit (b. 1994), and Cossette Zeno (b. 1930). Here, dreams and eroticism coalesce to explore the freedoms, and vulnerabilities, of the body. Mary Beth Edelson’s work speaks to the symbolic void and the erotic within the mythic. Drawings by the seminal Surrealist Bona de Mandiargues interrogate the rigidity of gendered forms. The obscured female figures in Tali Lennox’s painting drift through an enigmatic landscape where pleasure and destruction converge. Constanza Pulit’s screenprint unfolds from an intimate, psychological realm, where she instinctively generates a sense of in-betweenness, merging Latin American mythologies with personal memory to explore heritage, identity, and the erotically charged unconscious. Cossette Zeno’s biomorphic Aquatic Suspension explores space, the human and the feminine.

Artists featured include Marion Adnams, DaddyBears, Suzanne van Damme, Mary Beth Edelson, Jane Graverol, Síomha Harrington, Tali Lennox, Bona de Mandiargues, Natalia González Martín, Cathy de Monchaux, Meret Oppenheim, Mimi Benoît Parent, Constanza Pulit, Anna Sampson, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jo Spence and Cossette Zeno.

For press enquiries, please contact: press@richardsaltoun.com