Mary Wykeham: Surrealist out of the Shadows

Learn more about the fascinating life and art of Mary Wykeham, featured in Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, from Silvano Levy, author of Mary Wykeham: Surrealist from the Shadows, the first monograph to be published on the artist.

A solo presentation of paintings and prints by Mary Wykeham (1909–1996) features within our new exhibition, Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes.

This is the largest public showing of Wykeham’s work since her solo show of 1949 at Galerie des Deux Îles, Paris, and marks the donation of a large group of works by this under-recognised Surrealist artist to The Hepworth Wakefield.

Wykeham was a British painter, printmaker and poet. Throughout her long artistic career, she lived many lives. She was a young trainee nurse in London taking evening art classes at the Slade School of Art; an anti-fascist in Berlin helping Jewish artists flee the Nazi regime; a communist tailed through London by MI5; a Surrealist exhibiting alongside Eileen Agar, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte; and eventually a nun with a higher devotional calling.

Throughout these journeys, her art remained a constant activity, and within that, her deep connection to nature. Her landscapes vary from watercolours of idyllic rural scenes on the Isle of Wight where she grew up, to abstract geometrical engravings of the Algerian desert, and paintings of the Sicilian seaside.

If you book for the talk and exhibition admission together an automatic offer will apply.

Standard Adult – £20 (£11 Exhibition Admission, £9 Talk) SAVING £6
Full Time Student – £15 (£10 Exhibition Admission, £5 Talk) SAVING £5

Concessions can still save by choosing Standard Adult as ticket price instead of concession on the Exhibition Admission event.