Borrowings and Hauntings in Surrealism: Lecture by Dawn Ades

21 January 2026 
Overview
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Frida Kahlo, What the Water Told Me, 1938
Frida Kahlo, What the Water Told Me, 1938
Standard Ticket: £12 Concession Ticket: £10 6.30 – 8pm. Doors open at 6pm.
This talk's theme is the role of the past in modern art, exploring borrowings, continuities, and the lingering presence of earlier artistic histories.
 
The talk will focus on the following artworks:
• Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–21)
• Salvador Dalí, Profanation of the Host (1930)
• André Masson, La femme paralytique (1939)
• Frida Kahlo, What the Water Told Me (1938) and My Birth (1932)
 
Each work bears a distinctive relationship to Surrealism and employs strategies of concealment and revelation, both in its sources and treatment. Together, they offer insight into how modern artists engage with, reinterpret, and are haunted by the art of the past. 
 
The Speaker
 

Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, a Fellow of the British Academy since 1996, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, a former trustee of Tate and the National Gallery and was awarded a CBE in 2013 for her services to Higher Education.

She has curated or co-curated many exhibitions in the UK and internationally over the past forty years, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America (1989); the Salvador Dalí centenary at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, (with Simon Baker) Hayward Gallery (2006); The Colour of my Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011), and Dalí/Duchamp at the Royal Academy (2017). She was Associate Curator for Manifesta 9 (2012).

Apart from the catalogues of these and other exhibitions, publications include Photomontage (1976, revised 1986 and 2022), Marcel Duchamp (with Cox & Hopkins, 1999 and 2022) and Selected Writings on Art and Anti-Art (2015).

Research on Dada and Surrealism has shifted increasingly, though not exclusively to the women artists and poets associated with these movements, with publications on Hannah Höch, Mina Loy, Maria Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Cecilia Vicuña and Claude Cahun. 

Further Information

Booking is required due to limited capacity. 

This event is fully accessible, with lift access available to Gallery 3, where the event will take place. Please note that Gallery 2, located in the basement, is not wheelchair accessible due to the building's historic nature. Kindly inform us of any specific requirements when making your booking so that we may assist you.

Light refreshments will be served. 

Any queries please email: laurie@glenn-brown.co.uk 

Purchase tickets

Standard Ticket
Borrowings and Hauntings in Surrealism
12.00
Concession Ticket
Borrowings and Hauntings in Surrealism
10.00