Surrealism in Yorkshire: International Conference

2024 marks the centenary of Surrealism. In Yorkshire, The Hepworth Wakefield and the Henry Moore Institute are celebrating this with two exhibitions which look at different aspects of this enduringly compelling movement.

This one-day conference will take place at The Hepworth Wakefield on Friday 28 February 2025 to explore in depth the themes emerging from these exhibitions with leading experts.

The Keynote will be delivered by Professor Patricia Allmer, University of Edinburgh.

At The Hepworth Wakefield, Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes is a journey through the fantastical terrains of Surrealism over 100 years, looking at how surreal ideas can turn landscape into a metaphor for the unconscious, fuse the bodily with the botanical, and provide means to express political anxieties, gender constraints and freedoms.

At the Henry Moore Institute The Traumatic Surreal, co-curated by Professor Patricia Allmer (University of Edinburgh), brings together work made from 1960 to the present day by women artists in German-speaking countries, whose appropriation of surrealist sculptural traditions provided a means to negotiate the impact on women of the historical traumas of fascism and Nazism.

Yorkshire also hosts significant collections of British Surrealism that are held at Leeds Art Gallery and The Hepworth Wakefield, including through the Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection of British Surrealism, and the rich exhibition histories associated with these.

Organised by Henry Moore Institute and The Hepworth Wakefield.

Panel 1: Botanical Surreal

Chaired by Eleanor Clayton (Head of Exhibitions and Collections, The Hepworth Wakefield) and Dr Anna Reid (Senior Lecturer in History of Art, University of Leeds).

The development of British Surrealism in the 1930s coincided with that of important new research and knowledge in the life sciences, notably in ecology, including the coining of the term ‘ecosystem’ by botanist Arthur Tansley.

Key British Surrealists were fascinated with botanical studies, evidenced in the hybrid creatures of Leonora Carrington, the ‘scientific’ practice of Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff which resulted it tumescent depictions of flora and fauna, and in the work of Desmond Morris who trained as a Zoologist before becoming drawn to Surrealism in the 1950s.

Panel 2: Surrealism and Trauma

Chaired by Professor Patricia Allmer (Professor of Art History, University of Edinburgh) and Dr Clare O’Dowd (Research Curator, Henry Moore Institute).

Surrealist art and writing, forged in the aftermath of the First World War, offered from its inception aesthetically experimental, theoretically complex, and politically radical responses to that war’s deep traumas. Subsequent historical traumas have often impacted directly on surrealist artists (many of whom were, for example, forced to flee Europe to escape Nazism) and their works.

The legacies of such experiences, and other historical and contemporary traumas across the globe, continue to resonate in works produced by artists working in international surrealist traditions.

Panel 3: Surrealism in Yorkshire

Chaired by Dr Clare Nadal (Assistant Curator, Sculpture, Leeds Museums and Galleries / Henry Moore Institute).

Leeds and West Yorkshire have long had an important connection to Surrealism, with Leeds Art Gallery hosting the 1986 exhibition Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the International Surrealist Exhibition held in London in June 1936.

The Leeds doctor and city councillor Jeffrey Sherwin amassed a significant private collection and archive of British Surrealism, now housed at The Hepworth Wakefield, which formed the basis for reassessment of British Surrealism through exhibitions including British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye at Leeds Art Gallery in 2009.

Many artists based around Leeds College of Art worked in the legacy of Surrealism, beginning in the 1960s with Anthony Earnshaw, Patrick Hughes, Ian Breakwell and Glen Baxter. The first edition of the Leeds surrealist magazine Melmoth was first published in 1980, and 1994 saw the formation of the Leeds Surrealist Group.