TOYEN - A Border Crosser is Honoured with a Comprehensive Exhibition

TOYEN worked in Prague and Paris in the 1920s and 30s, always in close contact to the Surrealist avant-garde. In her early years, she influenced Poetism, an art movement that was only to be found in Czechoslovakia. TOYEN's early works in Paris stood out primarily for their erotic motifs determined by humour; later she explored desire in connection with violence and death and dealt with dream worlds. She was always involved in international exhibitions of the Surrealists - as a woman, she remained an exception in both the Prague and Paris Surrealist circles around Jindřich Štyrský and Jindřich Heisler as well as André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray. She tried to circumvent this "attribution" early on with the gender-neutral pseudonym TOYEN, derived from the French "citoyen" (citizen).

After the Second World War, she also settled in Paris for good as a result of the Communists' seizure of power in Czechoslovakia. TOYEN sought creative dialogue with the following generation of artists and saw how some of her experimental painting techniques from the 1920s were taken up and developed further in Informalism, especially her painting guided by emotion and her porous, cracked colour structures. From the 1960s, however, she was largely forgotten and died in Paris in 1980.

TOYEN's artistic treatments of the themes of freedom, identity and social boundaries are particularly topical today. More than 200 paintings, drawings, collages as well as previously unknown letters and photographs have been assembled for the exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The lenders include major European museums as well as French and Czech private collectors, who for the first time are making their works by TOYEN accessible to the public.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition contains the latest research insights into the career of an extraordinary modernist artist. TOYEN, who is hardly known outside the Czech Republic even in specialist circles, now seems to be receiving the reception she deserves.