Unveiled Desires II : Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1880 – Today

 

The second instalment turns to Surrealism's psychic landscapes, foregrounding how eroticism reveals the unconscious and shapes identity. The exhibition opens with works by Marion Adnams, Jane Graverol and Tali Lennox, establishing a cross-generational dialogue between the erotic, the fragmented body, and the Surrealist imagination. In Adnams' composition, 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 Lennox, whose obscured female figures drift through an enigmatic landscape where pleasure and destruction converge. As seminal figures, Adnams and Gaverol pathed the way for younger contemporary artists to find, within Surrealism, a terrain of playful resistance, self-invention and desire.

 

The second gallery brings together works by Anna Sampson, Cathy de Monchaux, Mimi Benoit Parent, Meret Oppenheim and Elsa Schiapperalli. Though differing in medium and period, these artists share a concern with rethinking the archetype of the female body. Here, the body becomes a site of negotiation, between cultural expectation and lived experience, between desire and myth. Drawing on feminist critiques of representation, these 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 Jo Spence, Mary Beth Edelson, Siomha Harrington, Cossette Zeno, Natalia González Martín, Bona de Mandiargues, Suzanne Van Damme and Constanza Pulit. Here, dreams and eroticism coalesce to explore the freedoms, and vulnerabilities, of the body. Drawings by the seminal Surrealist Bona de Mandiargues interrogate the rigidity of gendered forms, while other artists in the room foreground the psychic landscapes in which eroticism dwells. Mary Beth Edelson's works speak to the symbolic void and the erotic within the mythic; Cossette Zeno's biomorphic Aquatic Suspension explores space, the human and the feminine; Constanza Pulit's screenprints unfold 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.

 

The exhibition also features newly created soft sculptures by DaddyBears, conceived specifically for Unveiled Desires. These silky black forms appear to float within the alcoves, sensual, weightless objects that evoke the pliability of dreams. Their tactile presence channels the erotics of touch, rest, and imagination, echoing Surrealism's fascination with the charged intimacy of objects.

 

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

 

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