Repo women

Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering around White Cube Bermondsey, where the walls are so pristine no label is allowed to sully them, struggling to work out what I was looking at. I was reduced to photographing the works in order and tracing my itinerary in ink on the ground plan — shoot first, ask questions later — and even then I had to keep getting the attendants to tell me where exactly on the plan I was. One of them admired my wiggly drawing. Well, it was a surrealist exhibition.

Dreamers Awake sets out to repossess surrealism for women. In place of the ‘decapitated, distorted, trussed up’ female body that was the object of male surrealist fantasy, curator Susanna Greeves hopes to show ‘the symbolic woman of surrealism…refigured as a creative, sentient, thinking being’. Eighty years on from Meret Oppenheim’s fur teacup, do we need proof that women can do surrealism? Shows of ‘women’s work’ are tricky territory. The Saatchi Gallery succeeded with Champagne Life in 2016, but that was smaller: 18 artists to Dreamers’ 50. It was also more diverse, as it had no theme.

Despite surrealism’s claims to free the imagination, its vocabulary is limited; there are only so many ripostes to male erotic fantasies a girl can make. Decapitation, distortion and trussing feature prominently in this exhibition, whether repossessed or not it’s hard to tell; there are more penises and fewer breasts than in the male repertoire, but plenty of vulvas sculpted in bronze, carved in wood and teased out of pieces of fur and pubic hair. All the obvious names (Meret Oppenheim excepted) are represented, not always by their best work.