Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition

Edited by Nina Zimmer, Natalie Dupêcher, Anne Umland, with Lee Colón and Nora Lohner

The Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) may be best known for her furlined teacup of 1936, but her legacy encompasses much more than that notorious Surrealist object. Over the course of some sixty years Oppenheim produced a dizzying range of unconventional paintings, drawings, sculptures, collages, and assemblages. She engaged with witty wordplay, celestial bodies, and the heroine of a fable from the High Middle Ages, and employed unusual materials such as saws, almonds, and ornate picture frames. Only the force of her creative vision held together her freewheeling and singular artistic practice: “Nobody will give you freedom,” Oppenheim said, “you have to take it.”

Published in conjunction with the first major transatlantic retrospective of Oppenheim’s career, Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition takes its name from a series of drawings Oppenheim created in 1983, a lovingly rendered overview of her work that exemplifies her active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art. Essays by curators Nina Zimmer, Natalie Dupêcher, and Anne Umland critically examine the artist’s unruly output, bringing a new, full appreciation of an artist who has for too long been eclipsed by her most famous provocation.