В Кракове открылась выставка сюрреалистки Тойен, исследующая эротику и политический протест

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Through June 14, 2026—Poland’s art scene has been galvanized over the past year by museum exhibitions featuring women artists and foregrounding feminist themes. “The Woman Question 1550–2025,” curated by Alison M. Gingeras at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, evoked the question of reproductive rights in a country with some of Europe’s most restrictive anti-abortion restrictions. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (mocak), “Contemplating Art, Contemplating Love”—a retrospective of the Conceptual artist Ewa Partum, cocurated by then museum director Adam Budak and art historian Marta Smolińska—framed the female body as a political battleground. Running concurrently at mocak was the retrospective “Toyen: Dreaming in the Margins,” dedicated to the Czech-born Surrealist Marie Čermínová (1902-1980). Here, the most playful works felt keenly political, breaking taboos around female—often queer—desire. Coming in the wake of a nationalist surge in Poland, the exhibitions were both a much-needed respite and a reminder that much is at stake. The themes in the Toyen exhibition, highlighting the Surrealists’ fight against fascism and the censorship of expression and of sexuality, resonated darkly with intensifying populist attacks on civic freedoms. Organized in collaboration with London’s Richard Saltoun Gallery, the exhibition included most of Toyen’s graphic works (around a hundred in all) and fifteen oil paintings and objects, from the 1920s to the mid-’70s. Among them, her erotic illustrations stood out. In one of twelve hand-colored drypoints for Radovan Ivšić’s book Le Puits Dans la Tour. Débris de Rêves (The Well in the Tower. Shards of Dreams), 1967, delicate fingers part petal-shaped labia, the figure’s shaded background resembling choppy waves or a sudden gush. Toyen synthesizes pleasure and violence by capturing a sexual act’s sensual buildup and violent peak; her visual pun works because of the forms’ witty shape-shifting. A similar double entendre underpins another illustration for Ivšić’s book, in which two meaty fingers are about to pinch a nipple of what may be a bra-clad female breast—or the tip of a suggestively folded tablecloth. Two films shown at mocak, Andrea Sedláčková’s documentary Toyen: The Baroness of Surrealism (2022) and the more experimental Toyen (2005), by the Czech New Wave director Jan Němec, trace the artist’s life in her native Prague, where she was the only female member of the Devětsil art association (whose pioneering style, Poetism, blended construction and lyricism) and where she cofounded the Surrealist Group in 1934. The film follows her to Paris, where she immigrated in 1947, forming a close friendship with André Breton. Among her best early works, a series of twelve drawings, Střelnice (Shooting Gallery), 1939–40, starkly conveys the horror of political violence and the devastation of war (which Jewish poet and Czech Surrealist Group cofounder Jindřich Heisler survived by hiding in Toyen’s bathroom); the nightmarish blood-smeared fox heads and torn-off wings morph into chimerical skeletons in the later series, Schovej Se, Válko! (Hide, War!), 1944, as the protest against fascist carnage gains a more plangent tone. Toyen’s unsparing bleakness might be the most memorable takeaway from the exhibition, but it was arguably her unbridled eroticism that made her so inspiring for the postwar avant-garde, influencing, for instance, the sensuously macabre New Wave films of Jan Švankmajer (who joined the Czech Surrealist Group, then underground, in 1970). Her colorful ’60s and ‘70s collages of sumptuous cakes, cocktails, and oysters also bring to mind Věra Chytilová’s cinematic farce Daisies (1966), in which two young women crash a banquet of Communist dignitaries and devour their buffet. That Toyen and Chytilová made their works around the same time is pure serendipity, yet both seem torn between critiquing bourgeois consumerism and an earthy joie-de-vivre. What further binds them is a vision of genderless desire, bordering on nonhuman. In their nonsensical patter, Chytlová’s characters, albeit identified as human females, recall Surrealist automata. Toyen’s enigmatic paintings portray mannequinlike, hollow-bodied, breastless, calcified female figures. Some of Toyen’s later paintings eschew portrayals of bodies and do away with the gender theme altogether. Empreintes si fragiles dans l’oubli (Such Delicate Impressions of Oblivion), 1955, depicts two pink oblong forms, half-sunk in stormy indigo-green oceanic depths. At mocak, the composition’s dark, opaque palette contrasted with the flaming-red wall on which it hangs, drawing the eye back to the red forms, their agile erectness suggesting an amoebic ardor.