Untitled

Author: Annabel Kers

Hybrid figures come together in a twilight world:  a red figure – half human, half bird – on the back of a horse with the antlers of a deer, meets a beaked, many-eyed figure in the light of the moon, while a fish hangs upside down among the marshy plants. The maker of this small but impressive painting is the Canadian artist Mimi Parent, born in 1924 – the year in which André Breton published the first Surrealist manifesto. In 1959, Parent joined the Parisian Surrealist movement. In her work, Parent combines alchemical symbolism, utopian theories and Freudian subconsciousness with enigmatic metaphors. Her poetic and expressive imagery, with a fascination for the occult, fits in seamlessly with Breton's post-war surrealism. During his exile in America (1944-46), Breton reshaped his vision of surrealism, in which he assigned an increasingly prominent role to the occult. Despite her official entry into the circle around Breton, Parent's oeuvre has remained largely neglected until now.

Parent studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and settled in Paris in 1948. It was there that she studied ethnographic anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme and developed a fascination for alchemistic iconography – symbols which from that time onwards form a recurring motif in her work. In 1959, the year in which she joined Breton’s circle, Parent took part in the important Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (ÉROS). She showed La Crypte du fétichisme there, a crypt covered with black synthetic fur with works by artists that included Joyce Mansour, Meret Oppenheim, Breton and Roberto Matta, and her own work Masculin-Féminin.^[1] This assemblage, consisting of a made-to-measure suit with a horse’s tail made from the artist’s own hair in the place of the necktie, also adorns the exhibition poster. From the second half of the nineteen-sixties she became best known for her object paintings: three-dimensional collages in which painting is combined with objects from flea markets and antique shops.

She made this untitled painting one year after she had joined the Surrealist movement. It is a forerunner of the object paintings and reveals motifs and themes that are characteristic of her later oeuvre. The paint is applied to a foundation of gold-coloured sheet metal. This material is still partially visible and contributes to the stratification of the work. There are short, gold-coloured lines painted over the entire depiction. The composition shows similarities with later works, like Le Passage du mervillon (1979) and Adieu vieux monde (1991).^[2] The painting marks a transitional moment in the development of Parent's artistry, with iconographic elements that characterize her later work but are stylistically rooted in the preceding period.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen acquired this work in 2022 from the estate of the Dutch surrealist Her de Vries. It not only reinforces the post-war surrealism collection, but also gives emphasis to the renewed attention devoted to female surrealists and their place in art history.