Meret Oppenheim Kunst Buch (Art Book Shop)

Meret Oppenheim
Meret Oppenheim was born 1913 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, she died 1985.

Oppenheim’s drawings, a crucial means of expression for her, can be traced from her early pencil drawings and watercolours in her youth to the later magnificent gouaches dating from 1985, the year she died. One central period was the 1930s, a time in which the ready availability of the inexpensive medium played an important role, enabling the artist to use the (ink) drawing to jot down her ideas. After the war, and in the 1960s and 1970s in particular, she created more crayon and pastel drawings.

Meret Oppenheim’s works, in which the artist employs a reduced, often sparse pictorial repertory, confirm that immediacy is more crucial for the quality of a drawing than virtuosity. Such qualities of the drawing were certainly highly congenial with the artist’s artistic approach, with its characteristic openness, directness and intuition. Nature, i.e., transformational vital processes, the elementary forces and polarities (also of the sexes) as well as the temporal and cosmic integration are central themes of the artist’s work. What prevails are an abstract linear drawing style, in which the figures and things are captured in a few, reduced contours. What is represented is seldom narrative and its theme can hardly be clearly identified. Even the titles can be a bit enigmatic. Grotesque and even poetical titles can evoke associations or be provocative given their seeming arbitrariness. Many drawings show an affinity to the works of surrealist artists. In keeping with Breton’s literary technique, the so-called écriture automatique, they try to tap the possibilities of psychic automatism in the work with images. Even Meret Oppenheim was able to discover unknown pictorial forms in which unconscious contents can emerge in experiences taking place in the liminal realm between a waken and a dream state or in the process of drawing. (Galerie Krinzinger 2021).