Dreamers Awake review a sublime anatomy of female surrealism – The Guardian

Left, Gabriella Boyds Very inadequately dressed I am making my way from a ground floor flat up the stairs to a higher floor 2015; and, right, Untitled (Woman with Black Line) by Jo Ann Callis. Composite: Courtesy: the artists and Folio Society/Freud's Interpreting Dreams/White Cube; Rose Gallery

The word surrealism was coined by the poet Apollinaire a century ago, and refers above all to an art of juxtaposition, the concatenation of shockingly disparate elements, shorn of context, with the slippery, succinct logic of a bad dream. Little wonder it was Merriam-Websters word of 2016, owing to above average online searches.

Early surrealists sought to plunder unconscious forces; inevitably, sex was the main energy supplier. What this meant in practice was a prevalence of womens bodies, appropriated and dismembered. Voiceless, limbless, headless, the surrealist woman reaches her apogee in Magrittes The Rape, in which a face is formed from a torso, with breasts for eyes and a pubic grin.

This isnt to say that female artists havent found surrealism a productive field to plough, as the dizzyingly beautiful Dreamers Awake makes clear. A sublime survey of more than 50 female artists, from Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois to Hannah Wilke and Tracey Emin, the exhibition riffs artfully around what it means to live inside rather than gaze upon a female form.

A body is disgusting as well as desirable, meat incarnate, an animated corpse. Its hateful to be reduced to flesh, but there may be compensatory pleasures in the butchers shop. In Rachel Kneebones extraordinary sculptures, human and floral forms entwine and interbreed, the cool austerity of porcelain at odds with the frenzy displayed. Its like peering into a primordial soup full of synchronised swimmers. Is that a side of beef, a stamen, a penis, a hydrangea, a human thigh?

Bodies undergo translations, and they also leak and shed. Hair is everywhere: a sleek blonde ponytail worn as a fetishistic tie; a cheery tuft of pubic hair abandoned on a garden chair. Like dreamers, surrealists love visual puns. Best is Helen Chadwicks witty I Thee Wed: a set of five tumescent vegetables sea cucumbers? cacti? cast in bronze, each bound at the root with a ginger fur cuff, a lascivious ring. Sarah Lucas is likewise killer at the lewd eye-gag. In The Kiss, one chair penetrates another, cartoonishly embellished with tits and cock made from neatly bent and glued Camel cigarettes, ready-made for the post-coital puff.

You can laugh at the absurdity of human figures and the ways we think about them, but that doesnt erase their capacity to horrify. One of the oldest works here is a bleak little photograph by Lee Miller. It shows a stomach-churning place-setting photographed in Paris in 1921: checked cloth, knife and fork, and a human breast on a plate, the bloody remnant of a mastectomy. As a model and muse for Man Ray, Miller had been subject to all the customary visual dismemberments of the surreal gaze; now she shows what slicing into flesh actually looks like.

Not everyone born as a woman wants to stay there. The trans photographer Claude Cahuns subversive self-portraits show her in multiple disguises, slipping the knot of gender, refusing to participate. Cahun died in 1954, but its not hard to see why she has resurfaced this year, appearing in Queer British Art at Tate Britain, a show at the National Portrait Gallery with Gillian Wearing and in a new biography, Exist Otherwise (Reaktion).

The US conceptual artist Hannah Wilke is likewise deft at finding ambiguities in even the crudest physical depictions. Her Five Androgynous and Vaginal Sculptures are much more subtle than the title suggests. Humble as Etruscan jars, they delight in the abstract possibilities of human anatomy.

Hybridisation was always a surrealist strategy, visible in some of the earliest as well as more contemporary exponents here. The one-time debutante Leonora Carrington deployed surrealism as a means of escape, a launch pad to a liberatory landscape populated by monsters and beasts. In 1980, the year before her suicide, Francesca Woodman took an eerie, beguiling photograph of her upraised arms in birch-bark gauntlets: an Angela Carter figure at loose in the New Hampshire woods, girl metamorphosing into tree.

The best surrealist work possesses this uncanny dream logic, the feeling of a revelation barely glimpsed in the dark. One of the more compelling dream manifestations here is Kelly Akashis Well(-)Hung. A rope dangles from the ceiling, hung at intervals with bronze casts of hands. Are they ascending or trapped, the macabre relics of some medieval punishment? A few clutch small clammy objects, like sea anemones or jellies.

This enigmatic tone continues in Gabriella Boyds lovely indefinite paintings, made to illustrate the Folio Society edition of Freuds Interpreting Dreams. Nothing quite makes sense; there is a delicious sense of anticipation, of luminosity. Grass grows beneath running water, a pair of legs are stippled with black dots. The caption explains that this depicts a girls dream of her brother, slathered in caviar. Deliciously mortal, the body is ground for dreaming still.

At White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 17 September. Details: 020-7930 5373.

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Dreamers Awake review a sublime anatomy of female surrealism - The Guardian