a catalog of inquiries
the contemporary surreal
March 6 through April 18, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5:30 to 8 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.
This group exhibition presents eleven contemporary women artists working within the expansive terms and legacy of Surrealism. Within this broad domain, fantasy, invention, the subconscious, dreams, and altered realities are privileged over logic and order.
Artists include Larissa Borteh, Demitra Copoulos, Geornica Daniels, Ella Dwyer, Jean Roberts-Guequierre, Rebecca Kautz, Diane Levesque, Ashley Lusietto, Meg Lionel Murphy, Divyangi Shukla, and Lillian Supanich.
What is the contemporary surreal? Or is it a thing at all?
Many of the artists in this exhibition would not define their practices directly in relation to this historic art movement. Yet their work utilizes processes of chance and courts the uncanny. The work in the show touches on the spirit of the unexpected and often lingers within dream spaces and explores interiority.
Surrealism emerged in Paris in 1924. It developed from Dada, an earlier movement that utilized nonsense, theatricality, spontaneous play and the absurd to deflect and protest the trauma of World War I. Surrealism expanded those terms into notions of the subconscious, informed by the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Processes driven by chance helped unearth realities culled from beyond the known and expected.
Women played a significant role in Surrealism worldwide, in both art and literature, although their work was late to be fully recognized. Many male Surrealists courted female muses and produced images of fragmented or deformed female bodies (Andre Breton, Hans Bellmer). The female cohort explored issues of womanhood in different terms, within invented narratives that offered fluidity between the internal and external worlds. Their work staged freedoms -- to fly, to look into hidden places, to open locked doors, or show their own pain. They also elevated intuition to a mode of knowledge.
Like the earlier generation of women surrealists -- Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Leonor Fini and others -- the work in this exhibition is fantastical and inquisitive. It slips out of time frames. Meg Lionel Murphy and Jean Roberts Guequierre, for example, pull from Medieval and early Renaissance iconographies to build symbolic narratives about gender roles. Diane Levesque and Rebecca Kautz create dense, energized compositions from a vitality of paint handling, plucking source material from multiple references at once.
Diane Levesque, Twin Dolls with Ruler, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 40 inches.
Sculptor Demitra Copoulos' work is aligned with many of the Surrealists such as Remedios Varo in utilizing a vocabulary of symbolic objects such as eggs, bottles, the heart, and the candle. Like Hans Bellmer, Divyangi Shukla often works with images of dolls or puppets, both in sculpture and drawings, exploring dislocation and psychological charge. Painters Larissa Borteh, Lillian Supanich and Ella Dwyer cultivate chance in their work to foster unmediated expression, letting the flow of paint drive the unfolding of the composition. Sculptor Geornica Daniels brings together unlikely materials such as rope and zip ties to reinvigorate or disrupt well-known vessel and basket forms. Ashley Lusietto creates dense, small scale works on paper that visit hauntingly mysterious, spirit infused places.
This exhibition was curated with an eye toward the Chicago based Surrealist painter, Gertrude Abercrombie, whose major exhibition opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum on March 27. Abercrombie painted mysterious scenarios, often presenting a solitary woman in a stark landscape with symbolic objects.
Unknowingly, each of the artists in "a catalog of inquiries' could be a creative sister to Abercrombie. The affinities are broad, but a spirit of exploration generates a dialog. Art has always been a place of resistance in climates of crisis and anxiety. These artists, like their predecessors, court ambiguity over dogma, and mystery over determinism.
Ella Dwyer, Untamed, 2025. Watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 inches.
Rebecca Kautz, Mirror Self, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches,
Divyangi Sukla, The Blue Tin Box, 2025.
Found doll box, air-dry clay, wire, fabric, fiber, distemper, chalk, 16 X 9 X 3.5 inches.
Demitra Copoulos, Untangling, 2026.
Porcelain, ceramic, wood, 17.5 x 22 x 36 inches.
Larissa Borteh, Life Vest, 2025. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.
Jean Roberts Guequierre, Powerful Women: Saint Sebastian, 2021.
Oil on board, 20 x 16 inches
Meg Lionel Murphy, Seeding the Veil, 2026.
Acrylic gouache on paper, 64 x 50 inches.
Lillian Supanich, BLOODSUCKER, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 20 inches.
Geornica Daniels, Recede, 2025. Rope and zip ties, 27 x 12 inches.
