MoMA announces first major transatlantic exhibition on Meret Oppenheim for 2022

New York’s Museum of Modern Art announces the first major transatlantic exhibition devoted to the work of Swiss visionary artist Meret Oppenheim; it is also the first in the United States in the past twenty-five years. It will run at the renowned New York museum from Oct. 30, 2022 to March 4, 2023, and will exhibit some 180 works spanning five decades, including paintings, sculptures, objects, collages, and drawings. Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, this is the title of the exhibition, is organized by MoMA, the Kunstmuseum Bern, and the Menil Collection in Houston; curated by Anne Umland, Nina Zimmer, and Natalie Dupêcher, with Lee Colón, the exhibition will be on view first at the Kunstmuseum Bern (October 22, 2021 to February 13, 2022), then at the Menil Collection in Houston (March 25 to September 18, 2022), and finally at MoMA.

Throughout her 50-year career, Meret Oppenheim made unconventional works characterized by great originality. By the time of her death in 1985, her works included mystery objects, narrative paintings, and geometric abstractions, as well as jewelry designs, public sculpture commissions, and poetry. The exhibition aims to explore all these facets of his career, from early paintings such as Quick, Quick, the Most Beautiful Vowel is Voiding, ME by MO (1934), to mid-career sculptures such as The Green Spectator (1959), to monumental late works such as New Stars (1977-82). Her themes ranged from the natural world and mythology to gender and individuality.

Meret Oppenheim’s artistic career began in the 1930s in Paris, and when she was only 23 years old she made her most famous work, Breakfast in Fur, also known as Object: a cup with saucer and spoon all covered in fur; the work now belongs to MoMA’s collections, and the purchase of the Surrealist work made the museum the first museum venue to collect a work by the artist. In his early years in Paris, Oppenheim completed sketches, paintings, collages, and also worked on jewelry design and other fashion accessories. In 1937 he returned to Switzerland where he created a small number of works until his artistic revival in 1954. The exhibition will chronologically trace his art from the 1950s to the 1980s in relation to his early Surrealist output of the 1930s.

The artist’s last works include a series of twelve drawings, later titled by the artist herself M.O:: My Exhibition, from which the title of the current exhibition takes its inspiration. In these drawings, the artist imagined an exhibition of her entire production, drawing in miniature some two hundred works selected by her.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a rich catalog that brings together all of Meret Oppenheim’s art, from her debut in the 1930s in Paris to her death in 1985, through her post-World War II artistic developments with influences from Pop Art, Nouveau Réalism, and conceptual art.

Image: Meret Oppenheim, Object or Breakfast in Fur (1936; cup - diameter 10.9 cm, saucer - diameter 23.7 cm, teaspoon - length 20.2 cm and fur; New York, MoMA Museum of Modern Art).

MoMA announces first major transatlantic exhibition on Meret Oppenheim for 2022

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